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Yiqing Yang and Ming Wen

ship with your children.” Then the interviewers paused a second and asked, “All in all, on a scale of
1–6 with 1 being ‘not at all satisfied’ and 6 being ‘extremely satisfied,’ how satisfied are you
with being a parent?” Similar one-item measurement was used in previous studies (Mitchell, 2010).
Responses were highly skewed to “5 very” or “6 extremely” satisfied (n=280, 64.81%), with the rest
of responses containing less satisfactory options ranging from “1 not at all satisfied”, “2 not too sa-
tisfied”, “3 somewhat satisfied” to “4 fairly satisfied”. As such, parental satisfaction is dichotomized
into “satisfied=1 (categories 5 and 6)” and “not satisfied=0 (categories 1 to 4)”. Skewed distribution
aside, the following two perspectives help theoretically justify the use of parental satisfaction as
a binary measure: First, social desirability bias explains that people have a tendency to overreport
positive feelings about their family life rather than their real sentiments. Second, from the perspec-
tive of dissonance theory (Secord and Backman, 1974), parents report high satisfaction in the paren-
tal role in spite of the presence of deleterious relationships with children because they respond to an
attitude adjustment consistent with their earlier decision to have children. Dichotomizing this varia-
ble thus will help reduce the measurement error incurred by such tendencies. Moreover, ordinal logit
models were fitted with the original categories of parental satisfaction maintained as sensitivity test
and the results are comparable to those reported here (results available upon request).
2.3.2 Independent Variables
We tested five independent variables representing relationship quality with offspring, expectation of
various forms of support from offspring, and evaluation of offspring’s filial piety, based on ratings by
respondents of each of their grown children, respectively. Overall, the sample had 1,223 grown children
(range 1–8, mean=2.83, SD=1.17). About 9.26% had one child, a little more than one-third (35.19%)
had two children, almost another one-third (31.02%) had three children, and the rest had four or more.
For each variable, responses of the parent’s evaluation to each child were combined across mul-
tiple children and organized into three categories: 1=all children met expectation, 2=at least one but
not all met expectation, and 3=none met expectation. Relationship quality was measured by a single
question that asked, “Overall, how well do you and each of your children get along together at this
point in your life using a 4-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all well) to 4 (pretty well)?” Offspring’s
support was measured by asking respondents to rate to what extent each of their children’s behaviors
and activities met their expectations in terms of three types of support: emotional support (“listening
to your problems”), practical/instrumental support (“providing practical assistance”), and financial
support (“providing financial assistance”), respectively. Offspring’s filial piety was assessed by a
question that asked, “How filial is each of your children rated using a 7-point scale ranging from 1
(not filial at all) to 7 (extremely filial)?”
2.3.3 Parent and Offspring Characteristics as Controls
Measures of parental characteristics reflect late life variations in resources, which in turn, can create
opportunities and constraints for the parent-adult child relations to influence the risk of parental sa-
tisfaction(Mitchell, 2010).Therefore, we included parental age (entered as a continuous variable),
gender (1=female, 0=male), marital status (1=married, 0=widowed/divorced), financial strain (1=
yes — family income barely took care of family needs, 0=no), and self-rated health as parental cha-
racteristics controls. Self-rated health was assessed using a single item asking respondents, “How do
you rate your overall physical health on a 5-point scale ranging from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) these
days?” A higher score indicated better parental health.
Research indicated that parents’ perceptions of adult children’s problems (e.g., marital or partner
relationship problems and lack of career success) were associated with poorer parental well-being
(Cichy, Lefkowitz, Davis et al., 2013; Greenfield and Marks, 2006; Mitchell, 2010). We thus al-
so controlled for two offspring characteristics in the analyses, which reflected older parents’ evalua-
tions regarding how their adult children “turned out”. Offspring’s marital status was measured by
asking, “How satisfied are you with each of your children’s marital status rated using a 7-point scale

International Journal of Population Studies | 2016, Volume 2, Issue 1 57