Re: screening questions for abuse vs. harsh discipline

["Joan (Jody) Crowley" <jcrowley@xxxxxxxx>]

Regarding the proposed questions on spanking, one list member wrote: 

> We had a child who was spanked by his mother while standing alongside an
> ironning board.  He dropped to the floor to protect his butt during the
> spanking and dislodged the iron from the ironining board and it dropped
> into his lap.  This was reported by the child and witnessed by another
> child.   The resulting burn was not intentional but the child was injured
> in a way that was both serious and the direct result of the attempt to use
> discipline.  Is this nelect for disciplining him in a dangerous place,
> physical abuse by burning, or an unintentional injury complicating normal
> discipline practices?  My thought is that we need to focus on the parental
> intention and action and not the consequences in defining the problem.  I
> called this neglect (and stupidity) while a colleague focused on the
> result and argued that this was physical abuse.
> 

Of course, in an individual child abuse case, you need to look at all the 
surrounding circumstances before making a decision.  In a research context, 
however, we can't do the depth.  Instead, the researcher needs to get 
reasonably valid and reliable indicators of the research concept (in this case, 
physical abuse) that apply across a range of individual circumstances.  Cases 
like the one above inevitably fall into the measurement error aspect of the 
research (as would events that would have caused injury in standard 
circumstances, but for some idiosyncratic reason caused no injury in the 
specific incident). 

The proposed questions seem reasonable to me.  I agree with those who 
recommend some clarification about the level of injury. 

Jody Crowley
 

Joan (Jody) Crowley
Assistant Professor
Department of Criminal Justice
New Mexico State University
Box 30001, Dept 3487
Las Cruces, NM 88003-0001
505-646-5376