A Bit of Background on the PJI

A BIT OF PJI BACKGROUND

The Parenting Judgement Indicator (PJI) is an online situational judgement test designed to help parents and carers reflect on how they make everyday family decisions with children — and how they balance participation and control in the normal hurly-burly of home life. It focuses on the 9–11 age range, where the tension between parental authority and a child’s growing need for autonomy and agency is often especially visible. 

Using a set of typical family situations, the PJI asks you to consider four different approaches to handling each one: Directive (parent decides), Consultative (parent consults but decides), Participative (shared decision), and Delegative(children decide within clear boundaries). It then provides a Judgement score showing how well you matched style to situation to achieve a balanced outcome. The intention is firmly developmental: to help you notice repeating patterns, widen your options, and build a more flexible approach that respects parental authority while recognising children as meaningful stakeholders in family decision-making — without blame or pathologising. 

The PJI’s development has been shaped by Professor Ian Butler (University of Bath), and it was written by a child and educational psychologist and a senior HR practitioner/qualified barrister, with the scoring method developed by Dr Colin Cooper (Queen’s University Belfast). Internal consistency analysis of existing PJI data reports a coefficient alpha of 0.77 - a strong result for a test of this type - suggesting that the items are sufficiently inter-related to provide reassuringly consistent information about parenting judgement. 

What it is not: it does not attempt to cover the full complexity of parenting (including other adult actors), and it does not address serious personal, social, or emotional difficulties outside the normal range.