When participants were 14 years old, the CDP collected data on their perceptions of their parents’ knowledge of their whereabouts, companions, and activities. This measure consisted of five items asking participants how much their mother or father knew about (a) their friends, (b) how they spent their money, (c) how they spent their after-school time, (d) how they spent their free time, and (e) where and when they went out. The 3-point response scale included the options “nothing,” “some,” and “a lot.” A composite score of child-reported parental monitoring was computed as the mean response to the five items (α = .74). This measure likely reflects both parental efforts at obtaining information and participants’ willingness to inform their parents (Kerr & Stattin, 2000). We are unable to tease apart these possibilities. Though we refer to this measure as parental monitoring, as have previous publications using this scale (Dick et al., 2009), it is more generally a measure of parental knowledge.
