The Parental Bonding Instrument: factorial structure.

The Parental Bonding Instrument was administered to 49 schizophrenic out-patients attending a depot injection clinic. Subjects were instructed to rate each of their parents as they remembered them in their first 16 years. Principal components analyses followed by orthogonal varimax rotations were performed separately for mothers and fathers. The results suggested that the instrument is measuring two dimensions of parental characteristics; namely, care and overprotection. The findings lend further support to the internal structure of the instrument. The implications of the results for the prediction of relapse in schizophrenics and the expressed emotion construct are discussed.