It’s a good question. I’ve usually measured ideology as a side-effect when using a completely different method for running surveys.
Rather than writing all of the questions by myself, I have asked a bunch of people to give me me a bunch of qualitative descriptions of themselves that might be relevant for the survey, and then I’ve taken those qualitative descriptions and turned them into a large number of fixed-response-set questions, each question capturing a capturing different aspects a qualitative response. When factor-analyzing such a set of questions, usually a political factor pops out.
An equivalent for your case might be to qualitatively first ask a bunch of parents whether there is anything special about their manner of parenting, and then turning whatever they mention into multiple-choice questions.
However this is a lot of work, and it can also result in very long questionnaires that it may be hard to get responses for. So it may not be so practical.
An option may be to just ask a few relevant questions one can think of, e.g.
Do you think teen girls tend to be overly dramatic?
Do you think it is more important to teach children respect or independence?
Do you think parents ought to monitor their children’s internet access?
Do you think schools need to be more or less responsive to parent’s wishes about the material that is taught?
… and then create an overall score from that.
Though especially once ideological questions explicitly mention childrearing, it also raises questions about direction of causality. One could sort of handle this by asking about more distal ideological questions such as “Do you vote for Republicans or Democrats?” or “Do you think the government is too big?”, but by going further away it also makes it less able to capture ideological factors specific to childrearing.
I don’t know what the best option is, given your constraints, especially because I don’t know your constraints.
It’s too bad you didn’t have data by ideology. It seems to me that ideology is quite strongly related to attitudes towards childrens capabilities.
What question do you wish I’d asked?
It’s a good question. I’ve usually measured ideology as a side-effect when using a completely different method for running surveys.
Rather than writing all of the questions by myself, I have asked a bunch of people to give me me a bunch of qualitative descriptions of themselves that might be relevant for the survey, and then I’ve taken those qualitative descriptions and turned them into a large number of fixed-response-set questions, each question capturing a capturing different aspects a qualitative response. When factor-analyzing such a set of questions, usually a political factor pops out.
An equivalent for your case might be to qualitatively first ask a bunch of parents whether there is anything special about their manner of parenting, and then turning whatever they mention into multiple-choice questions.
However this is a lot of work, and it can also result in very long questionnaires that it may be hard to get responses for. So it may not be so practical.
An option may be to just ask a few relevant questions one can think of, e.g.
Do you think teen girls tend to be overly dramatic?
Do you think it is more important to teach children respect or independence?
Do you think parents ought to monitor their children’s internet access?
Do you think schools need to be more or less responsive to parent’s wishes about the material that is taught?
… and then create an overall score from that.
Though especially once ideological questions explicitly mention childrearing, it also raises questions about direction of causality. One could sort of handle this by asking about more distal ideological questions such as “Do you vote for Republicans or Democrats?” or “Do you think the government is too big?”, but by going further away it also makes it less able to capture ideological factors specific to childrearing.
I don’t know what the best option is, given your constraints, especially because I don’t know your constraints.