• The DFPS has two dimensions: reciprocal filial piety and authoritarian filial piety.

  • reciprocal filial piety, a kind of voluntary support, care, and love for one’s parents, which is motivated by the good nature of human beings, and entails a more balanced, two-way parent–child relationship.

    1. E.g., “Be concerned about my parents’ health”

  • authoritative filial piety, which is motivated by compliance to the norms of social roles and often involves passive submission and absolute obedience to authority.

    1. E.g., “Take my parents’ suggestions even when I do not agree with them”

• Respondents will be required to rate each dimension with eight items using a 6-point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree).

• A total score will be calculated for each dimension, with a high score indicating high filial piety in the respective type.

• The TDFPS has three subscales: family role norms, balance of interests, and good affection (each subscale comprises of five items).

  • family role norms are the extent to which children are internally motivated to show filial piety toward their parents.

    1. E.g., “I take initiative to accompany my parents if time permits – I passively accompany my parents only when they ask”

  • balance of interests is the extent of moderateness in which children show filial piety to their parents without violating the rights and interests of other people.

    1. E.g., “I will remind my parents that arguing with others for queue jumping is wrong – I will do my best to defend my parents if they argue with others for queue jumping”

  • good affection is the extent to which children show filial piety toward their parents based on their true feelings.

    1. E.g., “Showing filial piety to my parents is a natural expression of my real feelings – Showing filial piety to my parents is just an act for others”

• Respondents will be asked to rate the extent of their agreement with 15 items using a 6-point bipolar Likert-type scale.

• A low total score on each subscale reflects a great sense of filial piety in the respective dimension.

To examine the factorial structure, internal reliability, construct validity, and concurrent validity (using parent-child conflict) of the English version of these scales in the Malaysian context.

• 600 participants will be required for the for exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (n = 300) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (n = 300).

• The sample size of 300 participants is required for factor analysis as recommended by Clark and Watson (1995).

• EFA will be conducted by using statistical software R with psych package (Revelle, 2018).

  • Items with factor loadings of 0.4 or higher will be accepted, while the optimal number of factors to be drawn from the items will be determined using parallel analysis (Boateng et al., 2018).

• CFA will be used to compare the competing models to identify the best fit factor structure for the scale using statistical software R together with lavaan package (Rosseel, 2012) and semPlot package (Epskamp, 2015).

  • All the possible CFA models will be compared based on the model fit indices.

  • The recommended thresholds of the model fit indices are: ratio of chi-square to degrees of freedom (χ2/df) < 3; Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) and Comparative Fit Index (CFI) > 0.95; root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) < 0.06; and standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) < 0.08 (Hair et al., 2019; Hu & Bentler, 1999; Jackson et al., 2009).

• Reliability analysis will be run to examine the internal consistency of the scale by using statistical software R together with psych package (Revelle, 2018).

  • Internal consistency of each factor (dimension) will be assessed by using the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and McDonald’s omega coefficient.

  • A value higher than .70 indicates acceptable internal consistency (Albano, 2018).

• Construct validity

  • Convergent and discriminant validity will be tested by Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values using statistical software R together with lavaan package (Rosseel, 2012) and semTools package (Jorgensen, 2020).

  • According to Fornell and Larcker (1981), AVE values of greater than .50 would be evidence of convergent validity, while discriminant validity is achieved when the AVE’s square root is greater than the correlation between construct pairs for any single latent construct.

• Concurrent validity of the scales and their subscales will be examined using Pearson correlations with the Network of Relationships Inventory (NRI; Furman & Buhrmester, 1985).

  • Parent-child conflict was significantly associated with filial piety (e.g., Li et al., 2014; Wong et al., 2010; Yeh & Bedford, 2004).