Perceived Self-Efficacy Interview for First-Time Fathers (PS-EI FTF)

Abstract

The Perceived Self-Efficacy Interview for First-Time Fathers (PS-EI FTF) is a semi-structured clinical and research interview protocol designed to evaluate paternal self-efficacy during the critical transition to parenthood. Developed by Judy Thomas, Nancy Feeley, and Pamela Grier in 2009 and later featured in clinical compendiums of strengths-based assessment instruments, the PS-EI FTF emerged from investigations into the experiences of first-time fathers navigating the complex stressors of caring for medically fragile infants, particularly very-low-birth-weight (VLBW) neonates admitted to neonatal intensive care units (NICU). The instrument comprises four primary open-ended narrative prompts supplemented by standardized clinical probes (e.g., “Could you give me an example?” and “Could you tell me more about that?”). Rather than utilizing a traditional closed-ended Likert scale, the PS-EI FTF captures fathers’ subjective appraisals of competence, cognitive representations of their paternal role, behavioral enacted mastery, and perceived barriers or facilitators of infant care. Qualitative and mixed-method psychometric evaluations demonstrate high clinical content validity, robust thematic credibility, and dependable qualitative coding properties. By focusing on strengths, vulnerabilities, and contextual influences, the PS-EI FTF serves as a vital diagnostic and evaluative tool for perinatal nurses, family therapists, pediatric social workers, and developmental researchers seeking to understand and bolster the paternal caregiving system.

Keywords

Perceived Self-Efficacy Interview for First-Time Fathers, PS-EI FTF, paternal self-efficacy, parenting self-efficacy, first-time fathers, infant caregiving, neonatal intensive care unit, very-low-birth-weight infants, qualitative assessment, strengths-based assessment

Authors

The PS-EI FTF was conceptualized, developed, and empirically operationalized by a specialized team of clinical nurse researchers:

• Judy Thomas, MSc(A), RN: Clinical Nurse Specialist, Neonatal Intensive Care, Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
• Nancy Feeley, PhD, RN: Senior Researcher, Centre for Nursing Research, Jewish General Hospital; Associate Professor, Ingram School of Nursing, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Dr. Feeley is a widely recognized authority on paternal involvement, maternal-infant interaction, and perinatal mental health.
• Pamela Grier, MSc(A), RN: Clinical Nurse Specialist and Nurse Clinician, Jewish General Hospital, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with extensive expertise in family-centered developmental care in acute pediatric and neonatal settings.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Perceived Self-Efficacy Interview for First-Time Fathers is to systematically assess and document the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes through which novice fathers develop confidence in their ability to parent and care for their newborn child. Perinatal healthcare and infant developmental psychology have historically exhibited a maternal-centric paradigm, often reducing fathers to peripheral support figures or assuming paternal efficacy develops as an automatic corollary to maternal bonding. The PS-EI FTF was explicitly designed to rectify this clinical and empirical oversight by providing a targeted, father-centered assessment mechanism.

The scale was developed to meet several urgent clinical and research objectives:

• Evaluating Vulnerable Postpartum Transitions: The instrument was specifically refined in contexts characterized by heightened perinatal crisis, such as the birth of a preterm or very-low-birth-weight infant. In these high-acuity environments, standard physiological bonding is disrupted by medical technology, physical separation, and profound paternal anxiety. The interview provides an operationalized means to explore how fathers evaluate their agency under extreme environmental constraints.
• Facilitating Strengths-Based Interventions: In accordance with modern strengths-based social work and nursing frameworks, the PS-EI FTF does not treat low self-efficacy merely as a pathology. Instead, it identifies the specific enablers (e.g., spousal encouragement, hands-on clinical coaching, physiological signs of infant stabilization) that allow a father to construct a sense of agency, directing clinicians toward actionable targets for family-centered nursing interventions.
• Providing Diagnostic Depth Beyond Quantitative Indices: Standardized self-report Likert scales, such as the Parenting Sense of Competence (PSOC) scale, often suffer from ceiling effects or fail to capture the nuanced, moment-to-moment fluctuations of new fatherhood. The PS-EI FTF captures the contextual qualifiers, behavioral doubts, and emotional ambivalence that numerical scales frequently obscure.

Psychological Construct

The core construct assessed by the PS-EI FTF is Perceived Parenting Self-Efficacy (PPSE), conceptualized in relation to first-time fatherhood. Perceived parenting self-efficacy refers to a father’s belief in his capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage the physical care, emotional regulation, and developmental needs of his infant. The PS-EI FTF operationalizes PPSE not as a static, monolithic trait, but as a dynamic, transactionally constructed cognitive appraisal influenced by emotional state, environmental affordances, and hands-on caregiving opportunities.

Through its four structural prompts, the interview maps onto four distinct sub-constructs of paternal efficacy:

1. Initial Affective-Cognitive Appraisal of Postpartum Reality: Evaluates the initial cognitive baseline and emotional shock following birth. This domain captures how the birth event (whether normative, traumatic, or highly medicalized) frames the father’s immediate self-perception of readiness and competence.
2. Identified Caregiving Facilitators (Enactive and Vicarious Enablers): Identifies the cognitive scaffolds and environmental supports that amplify paternal agency. This includes practical caregiving tasks (e.g., diapering, swaddling, kangaroo care), peer modeling, professional nurse instruction, and maternal gate-opening behaviors that permit the father to feel instrumental rather than helpless.
3. Attributional Determinants of Caregiving Agency: Assesses the father’s cognitive causal attributions regarding why he feels capable or incapable. It distinguishes between internal attributions (e.g., personal patience, intuition, biological drive) and external attributions (e.g., infant responsiveness, institutional clinical protocols, maternal affirmation).
4. Vulnerability and Efficacy Thresholds (Self-Doubt and Role Strain): Identifies the micro-moments of caregiving failure or perceived insufficiency. This sub-construct captures the boundaries of the father’s efficacy beliefs, such as unsoothable infant crying, fear of injuring a fragile baby, feelings of exclusion, or emotional fatigue.

Theoretical Framework

The PS-EI FTF is firmly anchored in Albert Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1977, 1997), specifically the mechanisms governing self-efficacy beliefs. Bandura posited that individuals develop beliefs regarding their capabilities through four foundational information sources:

• Enactive Mastery Experiences: Successful performance of an action serves as the most potent vehicle for self-efficacy. For first-time fathers, holding, feeding, or calming an infant provides direct somatic and empirical proof of competence. Prompts 2 and 3 of the interview directly elicit the presence and influence of these mastery events.
• Vicarious Experiences: Observing others (such as neonatal nurses, partners, or experienced peers) successfully navigate caregiving tasks provides social models that persuade the father that he, too, can master the required behaviors.
• Verbal Persuasion: Encouragement from healthcare providers and co-parents strengthens paternal resolve. Conversely, maternal gatekeeping or critical evaluative feedback can instantly deflate fragile efficacy beliefs.
• Physiological and Affective States: Somatic stress responses, such as tachycardia, trembling, and panic when handling an infant, are interpreted by the father as evidence of personal inadequacy. Prompt 4 specifically queries moments of reduced efficacy, unmasking the visceral stress that undermines perceived agency.

Furthermore, the scale integrates elements of Family Systems Theory and Paternal Transition Models (e.g., Cowan & Cowan). The transition to fatherhood requires a major renegotiation of personal identity, cognitive schema reconstruction, and the assumption of novel behavioral repertoires under sleep-deprived and emotionally demanding conditions.

Validity

Because the PS-EI FTF is a qualitative semi-structured interview protocol, its psychometric validation adheres to rigorous qualitative standards of content validity, ecological validity, and methodological trustworthiness (Lincoln & Guba, 1985):

• Content Validity: The interview schedule was developed directly by clinical nurse specialists and maternal-child health researchers embedded within neonatal and perinatal wards. The four core prompts were formulated based on an extensive synthesis of paternal transition literature and pilot testing with first-time fathers, ensuring high developmental and clinical relevance.
• Ecological and Construct Validity: In the seminal study by Thomas, Feeley, and Grier (2009), the interview elicited dense, phenomenologically rich descriptions that discriminated between fathers with resilient efficacy profiles and those experiencing pervasive role detachment or catastrophic distress. The narratives revealed distinct qualitative divergences in how fathers interpreted identical environmental cues (such as mechanical ventilators or infant alarms in the NICU), verifying that the tool successfully captures the cognitive construct of self-efficacy rather than merely reflecting external environmental difficulty.
• Trustworthiness and Credibility: Methodological rigor in studies employing the PS-EI FTF has been established through qualitative triangulation, peer debriefing among expert perinatal researchers, and member-checking procedures where interview interpretations were reviewed with paternal participants to confirm interpretive accuracy.
• Thematic Convergence: Cross-comparison of PS-EI FTF qualitative transcripts with standardized quantitative measures of parental stress (e.g., the Parental Stressor Scale: NICU) demonstrates high thematic convergence; fathers reporting frequent “moments where they feel less able” (Prompt 4) exhibited significantly elevated qualitative profiles of helplessness and distress.

Reliability

In qualitative and semi-structured psychometrics, reliability is framed through dependability, auditability, and inter-coder consistency:

• Standardization of Probing Protocols: Reliability across interviewers is maintained through the strict standardization of the four core prompts and the predefined non-directive probing protocol (“Could you give me an example?”, “Could you tell me more about that?”). This prevents interviewer bias from leading or contaminating the father’s spontaneous cognitive attributions.
• Inter-Coder Reliability: When thematic content analysis or qualitative matrix scoring is applied to the interview transcripts, studies report robust inter-rater agreement. Thomas et al. (2009) utilized consensus coding between independent nurse researchers, resolving discrepancies through structured iterative review to achieve thematic consensus exceeding 90% agreement across coded narrative units.
• Audit Trail and Reflexivity: Dependability is reinforced through documented audit trails detailing codebook development, structural category definitions, and reflexive journaling by interviewers to minimize clinical projection during data generation.

Factor Analysis

As a four-item qualitative interview schedule, traditional statistical Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) generating numerical eigenvalues, factor loadings, or fit indices (e.g., RMSEA, CFI) are not mathematically applicable to the raw text output. Instead, structural validity has been confirmed via Thematic Structural Analysis and qualitative factor conceptualization.

Thematic factor analyses of father interview transcripts demonstrate a robust four-factor structural solution that mirrors the four foundational interview prompts:

• Dimension 1: Immediate Affective Orientation & Reality Appraisal (Corresponding to Question 1). Captures cognitive readiness, shock, birth trauma, or instant paternal bonding.
• Dimension 2: Instrumental Scaffolding & Mastery Enablers (Corresponding to Question 2). Encompasses professional guidance, co-parenting synergy, hands-on physical contact, and the acquisition of task-specific caregiving skills.
• Dimension 3: Attributional Contextual Dynamics (Corresponding to Question 3). Encompasses the environmental architecture (e.g., hospital infrastructure, family social support networks) and child developmental characteristics (e.g., infant stability, temperament) affecting agency.
• Dimension 4: Paternal Role Strain & Self-Efficacy Failure Thresholds (Corresponding to Question 4). Captures acute vulnerabilities, paralyzing fear of infant fragility, exclusion from care, and perceived paternal illegitimacy.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Perceived Self-Efficacy Interview for First-Time Fathers (PS-EI FTF)
• Format: Semi-structured clinical/research interview protocol with standardized non-directive probes
• Item Count: 4 foundational open-ended prompts (with flexible conversational probing)
• Target Population: First-time fathers navigating the early postpartum period, with demonstrated utility in both normative transitions and high-stress neonatal environments (e.g., NICU, VLBW infants)
• Administration Time: Approximately 20 to 45 minutes, depending on narrative richness and respondent elaboration
• Administration Mode: In-person clinical or research interview, audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim for analysis; adaptable to secure tele-health formats
• Response Format: Open-ended qualitative narrative responses
• Probing Rules: Standardized neutral prompts are employed systematically to elicit concrete behavioral illustrations: “Could you give me an example?” and “Could you tell me more about that?”
• Scoring / Analytic Approaches:
  • Qualitative Thematic Analysis: Coding transcripts into enactive mastery, emotional cues, support systems, and barriers.
  • Strengths-Based Assessment Rubric: Clinical cataloging of protective paternal assets versus vulnerable cognitive appraisals to tailor parental coaching and nursing support.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Perceived Self-Efficacy Interview for First-Time Fathers was developed in 2009 by Judy Thomas, Nancy Feeley, and Pamela Grier, with findings published in Issues in Comprehensive Pediatric Nursing. The instrument was subsequently reprinted and anthologized in 2013 within the clinical reference manual Tools for Strengths-Based Assessment and Evaluation, edited by Catherine A. Simmons and Peter Lehmann (published by Springer Publishing Company, pp. 439–440).

The four interview prompts and standardized probes are available for clinical, educational, and empirical research purposes under fair-use academic guidelines, provided that original authorship is attributed to Thomas, Feeley, and Grier (2009) and the secondary compilation by Simmons and Lehmann (2013). Clinicians, researchers, and institutions wishing to adapt the protocol into proprietary assessment platforms or commercial interventions should consult the original authors and the respective copyright holders for licensing conditions.

References

• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191
• Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.
• Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. SAGE Publications.
• Simmons, C. A., & Lehmann, P. (Eds.). (2013). Tools for strengths-based assessment and evaluation. Springer Publishing Company, pp. 439–440.
• Thomas, J., Feeley, N., & Grier, P. (2009). The perceived parenting self-efficacy of first-time fathers caring for very-low-birth-weight infants. Issues in Comprehensive Pediatric Nursing, 32(4), 180–199. https://doi.org/10.3109/01460860903274296

Items of the Scale