Someone is wrong on the internet.

[rivka]

Elsewhere on LJ, marycatelli asked me to provide references for a claim I made. When I went to provide them, I found that my comments to her journal were suddenly being screened. (My initial comments hadn't been.) Gosh. Somehow I begin to question the sincerity of her request for citations.

I understand why someone wouldn't want to risk being proven wrong in their own journal, but dude. Don't ask me to go to the trouble of doing a literature search for you if you don't ever intend to let the results see the light of day.

marycatelli (portion of initial post): When children can be accidents, sex drive will cope with a lack of desire for them, but when they have to be planned, it can't do it alone. (Which will not be all good for children. Battered children are more likely to be planned than non-battered children. They have the kid to fulfill their desires, and if the kid doesn't fulfill them -- whap.)

Someone else: Cite?

marycatelli: Professor Edward Lenoski (at the University of Southern California) studied abused children compared to a control group.

The percentages that were planned: 91% vs. compared to 63%.

Also, the battered children's mothers went into maternity clothes months earlier than the control group's.

Me: Dr. Lenoski's studies more than 30 years old and therefore vastly out of date (the psychodynamic stuff about children as wish fulfillment and maternity clothes are a good indicator of that). And even at the time the majority of studies found that unplanned pregnancies were more likely to be associated with abuse and neglect. That's certainly what subsequent high-quality research on the topic has reported.

A Google Scholar search indicates that Lenoski's work is not cited by current child abuse researchers, which is a pretty good indication that his conclusions haven't held up to later research. He appears to have mostly been cited by anti-abortion authors, who seem to have used his work to argue that no harm is done by compelling unwanted births.

In any case, it's probably a good idea to be cautious about citing a single decades-old psychology study as something approaching a universal law.

marycatelli: Children and mothers haven't changed.

Cite?

Me: Children and mothers haven't changed.

Perhaps, although that's also the sort of thing you'd want to see evidence for. But it's unquestionably true that child abuse research has changed. Significantly.

Lenoski published his study in 1968, just a few years after the first article identifying "battered child syndrome" appeared in the medical literature. At that point the prevailing view of child abuse was that it was a rare problem caused by severe maternal mental illness. Only the most extreme forms of what we now recognize to be child abuse were included in early conceptualizations; you can tell by looking at articles from the 1960s and 1970s about abuse outcomes, which commonly report statistics like "1 in 4 abused children die of their injuries and 10% are permanently disabled").

Also, at that time the field was still heavily under the influence of Freudian and psychodynamic theories, which meant that research often involved psychiatrists' subjective assessments of people's "conflicts" rather than objective measures. Because they had it fixed in their mind that child abuse was caused by Really Sick Parents, the effects of sociocultural factors, child factors, etc. were commonly overlooked in early studies. Statistical analyses (such as the ability to control for potentially confounding factors) were also pretty primitive back then, so their conclusions often haven't held up to more rigorous studies involving techniques like Structural Equation Modelling..

I'm not sure why you're so attached to this one particular study - or, honestly, how you even heard about it, given its utter lack of prominence in the literature. But seriously, let me repeat: "it's probably a good idea to be cautious about citing a single decades-old psychology study as something approaching a universal law."

Cite?

Sure, here's a partial bibliography.

Gipson, J.D., Koenig, M.A., Hindin, M.J. (2008). The effects of unintended pregnancy on infant, child, and parental health: A review of the literature. Studies in Family Planning 39: 18-38.

Sidebotham, P., Heron, J. et al. (2003). Child maltreatment in the 'children of the nineties:' The role of the child. Child Abuse and Neglect 27: 337-352.

Wilson, L.M., Reid, A.J., Midmer, D.K., Biringer, A., Carroll, J.C., Stewart, D.E. (1996). Antenatal psychosocial risk factors associated with adverse postpartum outcomes. Canadian Medical Association Jorunal 154: 785-799.

Zuravin, S.J. (1991). Unplanned childbearing and family size: Their relationship to child neglect and abuse. Family Planning Perspectives 23: 155-161.

Zuravin, S.J. (1987). Unplanned pregnancies, family planning problems, and child maltreatment. Family Relations 36: 135-139.

Altemeier, W.A., O'Connor, S., Vietze, P., Sandler, H., Sherrod, K. (1984). Prediction of child abuse: A prospective study of feasibility. Child Abuse and Neglect 8: 393-400.


Honestly, the only thing I can think of at this point is that the person took Intro to Psych from Lenowski 30+ years ago and always remembered his teachings fondly. Because otherwise, what the hell?

Comments

[avram]

I saw that the other day (linked by james_nicoll), and that bit about the battered children caught my eye. I noticed hadn't bothered to support it in any way, so I figured it was probably politically-motivated bullshit, but I didn't feel like wrestling with that particular pig.

This exchange indicates that you're dealing with an ideologue who isn't going to actually listen to any counter-argument:

You: In any case, it's probably a good idea to be cautious about citing a single decades-old psychology study as something approaching a universal law.

Them: Children and mothers haven't changed.

That response was the sound of the other person's mental defense gate clanging shut.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yep, good call.

I don't know if children have changed so much, but it takes a special sort of mental toughness to assert that mothering hasn't changed at all over the era including the women's liberation movement, the widespread availability of reliable birth control, and legalized abortion.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I think those things must change children, too. And to my eyes it seems that the culture as a whole expects parents to be a lot gentler with kids than it did when I was growing up, which must make childhood a different experience.

[ailbhe]

Quite.