We used two items to examine parental closeness for mothers and fathers (or parental figures) separately. These two questions were (1) “Do you feel close to your mother [father],” and (2) “Do you share your thoughts and feelings with your mother [father].” We adapted these items from the Attachment to Parents scale, which has good internal consistency and validity (Arthur, Hawkins, Pollard, Catalano, & Baglioni, 2002). Students rated their answers on a 4-point scale (1 = very true to 4 = very false). We secured a total score for maternal and paternal closeness by reverse coding and then taking the mean of scores on both items, so that higher scores corresponded to greater parental closeness. The internal consistency (α) was .70 for maternal and .83 for paternal closeness, respectively.
