Pediatric Inventory for Parents (PIP)

This inventory [27] examines perceived stress in parents of a child with a chronic illness. It is a 42-item instrument scored on a Likert scale, and has questions regarding how often a particular event has occurred (Frequency) and how difficult that event (Difficulty) was for the respondent. Scores are calculated in 4 sub-domains (Communication, Medical care, Emotional Disturbances, and Role Functioning) and then totalled to give a total difficulty and a total frequency score with higher scores indicating higher levels of stress in each domain. The scale has been used widely across USA, Netherlands, Spain and China and in numerous populations including parents/caregivers of children with cancer, diabetes, and sickle cell disease. Inter-item reliability was 0.91 for the ‘Difficulty’ subscale and 0.84 for the ‘Frequency’ subscale in our study.