Öz
Parental reflective function is parents’ ability to think about, infer, and interpret mental states of themselves, their child, and their relationship. In the current study, we examined the psychometric properties of the reflective function coding system on the Parent Development Interview. Data collected from 115 mothers who applied to a university mental health clinic seeking services (Mage = 36.01 years, SD = 4.96) and their children (Mage = 6.99 years, SD = 2.09, 41.7% girls). Parents were interviewed via the Parent Development Interview which was coded via mentalization coding system. Information about parents’ socio-demographics and attachment organization, and children’s affect-regulation, linguistic aptitude, history of maltreatment, and problem behaviors was collected. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses revealed three-dimensional structure and reliability analyses revealed good internal consistencies for each dimension. These dimensions were termed as child- (parents’ reflective function about child’s feelings), relation- (parents’ reflective function about mother-child relationship), and self-focused (parents’ reflective function about their own feelings) dimensions. Child-focused parental reflective function was associated with socioeconomic status. Relation-focused parental reflective function was related to parents’ avoidant attachment style, education level, socioeconomic status, number of children, and children’s positive and adverse experiences. Self-focused parental reflective function was associated with the number of children, children’s expressive language, affect regulation, and externalizing problems. The results demonstrated that reflective function coding on the Parent Development Interview is a good measure to assess self- and relation-focused parental reflective function, yet improvement seems necessary on child-focused parental reflective function of clinical sample in Turkey.