The Parent Health Locus of Control [
2] is a 30-item questionnaire used to assess a parent's beliefs about the health of a child. The questionnaire assesses beliefs of Child (6 items), Divine (4 items), Fate (5 items), Media (4 items), Parental (6 items), and Professional influences (5 items) over child health. In particular, the Child subscale assesses the extent to which parents think their child directly controls her/his health (e.g.,
My child is in control of her/his health); the Divine subscale assesses parental beliefs about the importance of God in influencing child health (e.g.,
My child's wellbeing is in God's hands); the Fate subscale provides an index of the extent to which parents believe that the health status of their child is predominantly a matter of luck (e.g.,
Whether my child avoids injury is mostly a matter of luck); the Media subscale is a measure of how much parents believe that all media, such as TV, magazines, and books, can directly influence their child's well-being (e.g.,
What my child sees on TV programmes can affect her/his health); the Parental subscale evaluates how much parents feel they are the principally responsible for their children's health (e.g.,
I have the ability to influence my child's well-being); the Professionals subscale estimates the extent to which parents think that health professionals control their children's health (e.g.,
Health professionals keep my child from getting sick). Parents were asked to express their degree of agreement or disagreement with each statement using a 6-point Likert scale with 1 =
strongly disagree and 6 =
strongly agree. Administration requires about 10 min. For each dimension a mean score is calculated by summing all the values for each statement/item belonging to the subscales and so ranges from 1 to 6 for every subscale. The American standardization [
2] showed internal consistency reliability coefficients (α) above .70 for all scales and test-retest (
r) correlations all above .60. The original version of the PHLOC was forward-translated into Italian by a bilingual researcher and then back-translated by another bilingual researcher. The two versions were compared according to back-translation techniques [
12]. In the Italian version, two of the 30 items were eliminated as not appropriate for mothers of children under 3 years of age (
My child can decide to live a safe and healthy life, and
My child reads influence his/her well-being). A pilot study with a small number of mothers ensured that the instrument was comprehensible for non-professionals.