The SIPA is a screening and diagnostic instrument that identifies areas of stress in parent–adolescent interactions, allowing examination of the relationship of parenting stress to adolescent characteristics, parent characteristics, the quality of the adolescent–parent interactions, and stressful life circumstances.

• Areas of parent-focused inspection include life restrictions, relationship with spouse/partner, social alienation, and incompetence/guilt.
• Areas of adolescent-focused inspection include moodiness/emotional lability, social isolation/withdrawal, delinquency/antisocial, and failure to achieve or persevere.
• Useful for family counseling, forensic evaluations for adolescent custody, identification of dysfunctional parent-adolescent systems, prevention programs designed to reduce parental stress, and intervention and treatment planning in high stress areas.
• This upward age extension of the third edition of the Parenting Stress Index (PSI-3) contains 112 items and is written at a fifth-grade reading level.
• Normative data were derived from 778 parents of adolescents from the general population and a clinical sample of 159 parents of adolescents who had received a DSM-IV™ diagnosis.
• Internal consistency coefficients range from .80 to .90.
• Test-retest reliability coefficients for the subscales range from .74 to .91.