The Parental Bonding Instrument was included on the 1989 self completion questionnaire.

The PBI is a 'retrospective' measure where study members were asked how they remembered, separately, their mother and father in their first 16 years. The 25 items are used to derived two dimensions: “care” and “control / overprotection”. Of the 25 standard items in the scale, one was omitted (item 4: Seemed emotionally cold to me), and five items were reworded from a negative direction to a positive direction (items 2, 8, 14, 18 and 24).

Individual items and derived measures (summary scales for father's and mother's level of care, and level of overprotection) are available as is the full recoding documentation¹⁾

• You can obtain a list of the standard topic variables to use in an NSHD data sharing request by selecting the link below.
  

HTML version of the standard variables to view