Predicting Co-Parenting Quality From Marital Adjustment, Parenting Self-Efficacy, and Psychological Distress Using Gradient Boosting Regression
Keywords:
Co, Parenting Quality, marital adjustment, parenting self, efficacy, psychological distressAbstract
Objective: This study aimed to predict co-parenting quality from marital adjustment, parenting self-efficacy, and psychological distress among Brazilian parents using Gradient Boosting Regression and to determine the relative predictive importance and nonlinear contribution of these variables.
Methods and Materials: This cross-sectional predictive study included 462 Brazilian parents who were married or cohabiting with the other biological or adoptive parent of at least one child aged 3–12 years. Co-parenting quality was assessed using the Coparenting Relationship Scale, marital adjustment using the Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale, parenting self-efficacy using the efficacy component of the Parenting Sense of Competence Scale, and psychological distress using the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale. The dataset was divided into training (80%, n = 369) and holdout test (20%, n = 93) subsets. Gradient Boosting Regression was tuned using five-fold cross-validation. Predictive performance was evaluated using R², root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percentage error and was compared with multiple linear regression. Predictor importance was examined using permutation importance and SHAP values.
Findings: In the holdout sample, Gradient Boosting Regression explained 61% of the variance in co-parenting quality, with RMSE = 15.95, MAE = 12.41, and MAPE = 8.73%. The model outperformed multiple linear regression, which explained 49% of the variance and yielded RMSE = 18.23 and MAE = 14.52. Marital adjustment showed the greatest predictive importance, with normalized importance = .48, permutation importance = .264, and mean absolute SHAP value = 12.84. Psychological distress was the second most important predictor (.31; .171; 8.19), followed by parenting self-efficacy (.21; .108; 5.73). Partial-dependence patterns indicated positive nonlinear associations for marital adjustment and parenting self-efficacy and a negative nonlinear association for psychological distress.
Conclusion: Co-parenting quality was predicted with substantial accuracy from marital adjustment, psychological distress, and parenting self-efficacy, with Gradient Boosting Regression outperforming conventional linear modeling.
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