Building a Healthy Home: Parental Self-Efficacy to Prevent Exposure to Environmental Contaminants in Children

Introduction: Indoor environmental contaminants such as lead, radon, and pesticides are prevalent in American homes and have dire consequences to children’s development, especially for children under six¹. The Surgeon General made a call to promote healthy homes and funding has been dedicated to develop interventions to reduce childhood environmental contaminant exposure. To optimize the efficacy and impact of programs aiming to reduce exposure², there is further need to investigate parental factors that mediate or moderate behavioral change. Based on theoretical frameworks guiding health behavior change ^3,4,5,6parental self-efficacy is one such psychological construct which could help explain why and for whom an intervention is effective. The current study presents a measure developed to assess parental self-efficacy for protecting children from environmental contaminant exposure.

Methods: Based on the extant literature, four areas predictive of potential contaminant exposure within the home were focused on to develop 32 items related to parental self-efficacy. These items related to general self-efficacy, susceptibility/vulnerability, nutrition, and general health.  The resulting measure, the Parental Self-efficacy for Contaminant Exposure Prevention (PS-CEP), was administered to 230 parents of children attending a local Head Start in a southeastern metropolitan area to conduct an exploratory factor analysis; a confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using a national sample of 350 parents of children under six drawn from an on-line polling website. Convergent and Discriminant validity of the PS-CEP will be assessed against existing measures; self-esteem⁷; general self-efficacy⁸; and parental sense of competence scale⁹along with parental demographic information to allow for a description of who is likely to report higher levels of self-efficacy.

Results: Based on model fit indices in the exploratory factor analysis, a five-factor model was the best fit (TLI = .80; SRMR = .046).Factor loadings for the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses will be displayed. Additionally, convergent and discriminant validity will be included along with descriptive information on who is most likely to demonstrate higher levels of self-efficacy to prevent contaminant exposure in their children.

Conclusions:Existing primary prevention tactics have shown unreliable results in reducing or preventing the detrimental consequences of exposure.  The development of a low cost psychometrically sound measure of this type would allow interventions to be tailored based on parents’ self-efficacy to more appropriately support them in taking steps to create healthier environments for their children. Additionally, a measure of self-efficacy would expand research questions and prevention tactics in the healthy homes literature.