Family reminiscence scale: a measure of early communicative context

Abstract

We developed and validated the Family Reminiscence Scale (FARS) in which adults rate their frequency of reminiscing with their parents about childhood experiences. In three studies, we characterized how FARS was related to adults' recollections of their earliest memories in different cultural contexts. First, we examined the factorial structure of FARS and obtained two factors of reminiscing: first-time events and general-recurrent events. In the second study, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted, in which we established measurement invariance across gender and age groups. In Study 3, we tested the factorial structure of FARS in an American sample to ensure cross-cultural invariance. We also showed that the two factors were differentially related to the phenomenology of earliest memories in samples from Turkey and United States (Study 2 & Study 3). Overall, FARS was found to be reliable and valid to measure for adult samples to assess the quality of the linguistic input during childhood. Predictive value of FARS has been shown across different gender, age, and culture groups, underlining the organizational role of the early communicative context in the phenomenology and linguistic style of adults' early memories.