Aku Kallio

The interactional practices of restricting children’s television viewing

Mediating and restricting children’s media use is an everyday task for contemporary families. In this paper I examine the negotiations of children’s media use as a social practice in which parents and children occupy various deontic and epistemic statuses. The data consist of video recordings captured in 26 Finnish families. A total of 44 occurrences in which parents restrict their children’s media use are examined. Conversation analysis is the method of this study. The results reveal how restrictions are linked not only to the amount of media use and the quality of media content but also to the time management of families and children’s socialization on a larger scale. Further, I examine children’s agency and interactional strategies to resist parental authority. I also show how these strategies vary with the age of children.

Keywords: children’s media use, family interaction, directives, socialization, parental mediation

Juuli Halonen, Rosa Rintala, Matilda Sorkkila, Anna Rönkä & Kaisa Aunola

An ideal parent in the light of the parents’ own and perceived societal ideals in Finland

Parental ideals reflect norms of the individual and surrounding society, and can therefore be seen to represent the expectations and obligations of parenthood. The present study examined parental ideals of mothers and fathers, and parents’ views of parental ideals set by society in Finland. The study is based on the Finnish dataset collected in the context of International Investigation of Parental Burnout (IIPB) international consortium. Views on the qualities of an ideal parent and perceived societal parental ideals were collected from 1,431 parents using an internet-based questionnaire. The results of a thematic analysis demonstrated that parents reported similar ideal characteristics of a parent for themselves and for their spouses. Mothers and fathers’ reports were very similar. The most typical characteristics of an ideal parent included loving, patient and disciplinarian. The results further showed, however, that parents’ personal parental ideals differed from their perception of ideals set by society; selflessness, work-oriented & educated, wealthy, housekeeping, hard-working and omnipotent occurred only in ideals perceived to be set by society. Overall, the parental ideals of mothers and fathers were discordant with their views of societal ideals. Because expectations from society and a discordance between ideals can affect parental well-being and parenting, parental ideals and possible discordances should be taken account when aiming to support parenthood.

Keywords: ideal parent, ideal mother, ideal father, social expectations, parental ideals

Alar Kaskikallio, Patrick Jern & Minja Westerlund

Psychometric qualities of the Finnish HEXACO-PI-R: Component structure and reliabilities

HEXACO-PI-R measures variation in personality on six main personality dimensions (Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience) and 25 subscales. The component structure of the inventory has been replicated in several previous studies using other language versions of the questionnaire. In the present study, we assessed the Finnish translation of the psychometric properties and component structure of the questionnaire using a large Finnish sample. The sample consisted of 5,724 participants (68.8% women; age mean 30.70 years, SD 8.27). Exploratory principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to assess the questionnaire structure, with contradictory results. The former supported the six-component solution of the original HEXACO-PI-R. Here, the four subscales loaded on each main dimension as expected, with a few additional crossloadings appearing. The hundred items of the test also loaded on the subscales mainly as expected. A clear exception to this were the items in the Openness to Experience dimension: the items loaded on four components, but the components differed from the original model. Results from the confirmatory factor analysis did not give support to the six-factor model. The Finnish HEXACO-PI-R can be recommended for use in assessing personality with some caveats. For example, caution should be exercised when interpreting any subscale scores. In future studies, it would be recommended to, in particular, examine associations between the Finnish HEXACO-PI-R and other commonly utilized personality measures. Further research is also required on the structural validity of the questionnaire.

Keywords: HEXACO, personality, personality assessment, trait theory, principal component analysis