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rivkaMy dissertation is about child physical abuse. (I'm not going to get into the details about which aspects at the moment. Maybe later.) Now, you can't come right out and ask parents, "so, do you abuse your kids?" - not if you want accurate answers. You can't very easily ask minor children what their parents do to them - not as research, anyway. You can limit your subject population to people who have been investigated or convicted of child abuse - lots of people do that - but you always wind up wondering whether there's a difference between the ones Child Protective Services have identified and the ones who haven't been caught. (The answer is almost certainly "yes.")
Fortunately, there are other options. To assess abuse potential, we use an analog task - a laboratory situation designed to elicit responses that are similar to what people would do in the real world. We use a slide show of children doing various things, and ask parents what they would do. We ask them to characterize the behavior (fine, rude, dangerous, annoying, etc.), to describe how they'd feel if their child did it, and to select a response - options range from "not mind" to "hit the child with a belt, hairbrush, or other object," and pretty much everything we could think of in between. We also ask what they'd do if their child repeated the pictured behavior - whether they'd have the same thing or something else, and how often they'd have to see it before they changed their response.
The slides range from innocuous activities (a toddler has toys spread out all around him, a little girl is picking her nose), to things that bother some parents more than others (a six year old is putting on her mother's makeup, an eleven year old boy is looking at Playboy), to things that are irritating but age-expected (the toddler has gotten hold of someone's glasses, a kid of eight or nine has spilled a jar of salsa on the floor), to things that are wantonly destructive (a child is tearing pages out of a book), to things that are dangerous (the kid of eight or nine is lighting matches), to things that are incredibly dangerous (the eleven year old is loading a handgun). Parents get really involved in the slides - much more so than I think they would if we were asking them to discuss things hypothetically, or read written descriptions.
We're interested in how willing they are to choose forms of discipline that are physical (like spanking) or emotionally harmful (like ridiculing the child), how intensely they ramp up their reactions to future misbehavior, and how much they differentiate between various kinds of misbehavior - for example, things that are just annoying vs. things that are dangerous, or things done by very young children vs. things done by children who are "old enough to know better."
This works pretty well as an analog measure: parents involved with CPS have higher scores than parents not involved with CPS, people who were themselves physically abused as children have higher scores than people who weren't, scores go up under stress, and so forth. We don't say that high scores mean that a parent is abusive - the only proof of abuse is, well, abuse - but we do think that high scorers are more similar to abusive parents than low scorers. They're not abusive parents, but they're a good lab analog for abusive parents.
I bring this up now because I've been working on the incredibly tedious task of entering the data from this measure, and some thoughts have presented themselves.
Given all of the rhetoric about CPS witch hunts and government interference in child-rearing and the pathologizing of spanking by evil liberals, wouldn't you think people would balk at telling a psychologist at a state-run university that they hit their kids? I genuinely worried that no one would be willing to endorse heavy discipline - that they'd be too focused on trying to make themselves look like sensitive, enlightened parents. My fears turn out to have been groundless. Lots of spanking, yelling, and ridicule going on, and although no one yet has suggested beating a kid with an belt, someone's suggested slapping a kid across the face. Yeesh.
I am struck by some oddities in the responses to the escalation questions - where we're asking "okay, and if your kid kept doing this, how would you change your response?" Most people's answers make sense - for example, the first time their kid dumped out their sewing basket, they say they "wouldn't mind," but if he did it a second time they'd "send him to his room." But several of them pick "threaten to spank" as a first response, and then escalate to something entirely different - such as "take away a privilege." And two people have had a consistent pattern of picking "yell at her" or "ridicule her" as an initial response, and then picking "explain why she shouldn't do this" as their escalation response. If you're going to give your child an explanation of why she shouldn't do something, wouldn't you think it would be your first response? Why would you hold off until after you've used a couple of less supportive methods and they haven't worked?
And finally: I am deeply suspicious of the person who provided the exact same responses to every slide. First episode, they said they'd explain why the child shouldn't do it. Second episode, they'd take away a privilege. The answers were identical whether the child was a five year old mischievously sticking out her tongue, or an eleven year old loading a handgun. They said that every behavior would "worry" them - never, ever would they be "angry." I don't believe them. The consistency strikes me as abnormal. It makes me feel like they have something to hide.
Fortunately, there are other options. To assess abuse potential, we use an analog task - a laboratory situation designed to elicit responses that are similar to what people would do in the real world. We use a slide show of children doing various things, and ask parents what they would do. We ask them to characterize the behavior (fine, rude, dangerous, annoying, etc.), to describe how they'd feel if their child did it, and to select a response - options range from "not mind" to "hit the child with a belt, hairbrush, or other object," and pretty much everything we could think of in between. We also ask what they'd do if their child repeated the pictured behavior - whether they'd have the same thing or something else, and how often they'd have to see it before they changed their response.
The slides range from innocuous activities (a toddler has toys spread out all around him, a little girl is picking her nose), to things that bother some parents more than others (a six year old is putting on her mother's makeup, an eleven year old boy is looking at Playboy), to things that are irritating but age-expected (the toddler has gotten hold of someone's glasses, a kid of eight or nine has spilled a jar of salsa on the floor), to things that are wantonly destructive (a child is tearing pages out of a book), to things that are dangerous (the kid of eight or nine is lighting matches), to things that are incredibly dangerous (the eleven year old is loading a handgun). Parents get really involved in the slides - much more so than I think they would if we were asking them to discuss things hypothetically, or read written descriptions.
We're interested in how willing they are to choose forms of discipline that are physical (like spanking) or emotionally harmful (like ridiculing the child), how intensely they ramp up their reactions to future misbehavior, and how much they differentiate between various kinds of misbehavior - for example, things that are just annoying vs. things that are dangerous, or things done by very young children vs. things done by children who are "old enough to know better."
This works pretty well as an analog measure: parents involved with CPS have higher scores than parents not involved with CPS, people who were themselves physically abused as children have higher scores than people who weren't, scores go up under stress, and so forth. We don't say that high scores mean that a parent is abusive - the only proof of abuse is, well, abuse - but we do think that high scorers are more similar to abusive parents than low scorers. They're not abusive parents, but they're a good lab analog for abusive parents.
I bring this up now because I've been working on the incredibly tedious task of entering the data from this measure, and some thoughts have presented themselves.
Given all of the rhetoric about CPS witch hunts and government interference in child-rearing and the pathologizing of spanking by evil liberals, wouldn't you think people would balk at telling a psychologist at a state-run university that they hit their kids? I genuinely worried that no one would be willing to endorse heavy discipline - that they'd be too focused on trying to make themselves look like sensitive, enlightened parents. My fears turn out to have been groundless. Lots of spanking, yelling, and ridicule going on, and although no one yet has suggested beating a kid with an belt, someone's suggested slapping a kid across the face. Yeesh.
I am struck by some oddities in the responses to the escalation questions - where we're asking "okay, and if your kid kept doing this, how would you change your response?" Most people's answers make sense - for example, the first time their kid dumped out their sewing basket, they say they "wouldn't mind," but if he did it a second time they'd "send him to his room." But several of them pick "threaten to spank" as a first response, and then escalate to something entirely different - such as "take away a privilege." And two people have had a consistent pattern of picking "yell at her" or "ridicule her" as an initial response, and then picking "explain why she shouldn't do this" as their escalation response. If you're going to give your child an explanation of why she shouldn't do something, wouldn't you think it would be your first response? Why would you hold off until after you've used a couple of less supportive methods and they haven't worked?
And finally: I am deeply suspicious of the person who provided the exact same responses to every slide. First episode, they said they'd explain why the child shouldn't do it. Second episode, they'd take away a privilege. The answers were identical whether the child was a five year old mischievously sticking out her tongue, or an eleven year old loading a handgun. They said that every behavior would "worry" them - never, ever would they be "angry." I don't believe them. The consistency strikes me as abnormal. It makes me feel like they have something to hide.
