How would you rate your performance as a parent?

How would you rate your performance as a parent? Have you ever really thought about this question? Well, I have thought about that question. I looked at my kids every day and wondered how I would register on a questionnaire about my parenting skills. It’s tough enough in a two parent household, but what about a single parent household. My study would be on the differences between the parenting skills of today verses the parenting skills of yesterday. My main focus would be on discipline and the single parent household. I would use a random sample of 50 single parents, 25 single mothers and 25 single fathers. I consider this a cluster sampling. Clustering is a variation of simple random sampling that involves dividing the sample into groups based on more than one level of analysis (Newman, 2011). Of course, there is always some degree of sampling error because there is no such thing as a perfect sample (Newman, 2011). My study would be a questionnaire type study; using 5 simple questions and a ratio scale because this type captures attitudes and opinions and is one of the easiest to score. Now as I said earlier, I have narrowed my study down to discipline as the main parenting skill: So my five questions would attempt to stay concentrated on questions on discipline. My five Questions would be:

1). Is it acceptable to use physical forms of discipline?

2). Is spanking discipline or abuse?

3). Is lack of discipline a root problem to chaos in society among the youth of today?

4). Is Respect taught today? 5).

Do you feel you are a good Parent? All five of these questions would be answered using a Ratio scale of 1-5, based on levels of agreement or disagreement.

Where 1 is strongly disagree, 2 is disagree, 3 is neutral, 4 is agree, 5 is strongly agree. In finalizing my questionnaire, I would look back to make sure that the order of my questions and to make sure that as the book says: are my questions in a proper order and do they make sense (Newman, 2011). Efforts in strengthen family relationships can be a challenge in commonly traditional delivery (Sanders, & Prinz, 2008). This goes for any type of survey in my opinion, however, for my study I will focus mainly on discipline techniques and what Sanders calls population approach. This is using a group, within a population (Sanders & Prinz, 2008). This type of approach can expose inconsistent parenting methods. Finally, an improvement for my study of parental discipline techniques would be to make the study an observational Naturalistic Research study. This has someone observing their body language, while they take the questionnaire, all while the subjects are in a natural setting.