Pictures from the past.

[rivka]

I never got around to presenting my dissertation data at the primary conference in my field - mostly because by the time I finished the damn thing, the research I was doing was completely separate from my dissertation topic. I always had HIV stuff to present at the Society of Behavioral Medicine. Besides, it's not a conference that tends to bring in many people with either child/developmental interests, or disability interests, so my dissertation topic was off the beaten track for the meeting.

But this year I thought, what the hell. I submitted an abstract based on my dissertation research, and it was accepted for presentation as a poster. (I knew I wasn't going to be offered an oral presentation, given the off-the-beaten-trackness.) Now I'm putting the poster together, which means, among other things, that I pulled out the photos of misbehaving children which I used for our analog measure of abuse potential.

There's a lot more information about the analog task at that link, but essentially, we showed parents slides of various child behaviors and asked them how they would respond. Some of the photos are normal kid stuff, and some of them are really not. There's a mix of normal behaviors, rule violations, destructive behaviors, and dangerous behaviors.

[photos removed]

I thought people might be interested in seeing the photos, so I uploaded about a dozen of them to my Flickr account. You can see the whole set here. (Photos have been taken down.)

Because they're research items, I'm only going to leave them up for a few days - so look now, if you're curious.

Comments

[rivka.livejournal.com]

You really want to get the cultural critic in your head going? There's been some discussion of whether the diagnostic criteria for Conduct Disorder (http://www.mentalhealth.com/dis1/p21-ch02.html) ought to be different for boys and girls. The idea is that because antisocial and aggressive behaviors are more rare (and therefore more deviant) for girls than for boys, you should be able to diagnose a girl as being Conduct Disordered even if she has fewer or milder symptoms than would be required to diagnose a boy.

No, seriously.

[iamjw.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I don't know about this but I do know, anecdotally, that more boys than girls get tested for learning disabilities/behavioural issues/giftedness because boys tend to act out more and girls tend to go inwards. So, you know, if you're not causing problems nobody thinks that you have issues that need addressing. It's one of the reasons that private schools that are not single-gender are heavily skewed towards male students.

I would imagine then that what is necessary in terms of Conduct Disorder would be a different set of symptoms for girls rather than fewer/milder.

However, I have no actual knowledge of this area other than what I've observed so I could be talking copmpletely out of my ass here.