RE: severity rating

[Stephanie Brown <StephanieB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Connie,

We use Barnett, Manly and Cicchetti's scale, which is described in their
article:

Douglas Barnet, Jody Todd Manly, and Dante Cicchetti. Defining Child
Maltreatment: The Interface between Policy and Research. in Child Abuse,
child development & social policy. D. Cicchetti and S. L. Toth, eds.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 1993

They divide abuse/neglect into six categories and then provide guidelines
for rating the severity of specific instances on a scale of 1 to 5.

Hope this helps.

Stephanie Brown
Research Associate
Institute for the Study of Community Based Services
Edgewood Center for Children and Families
San Francisco, CA

-----Original Message-----
From: Connie Horton [mailto:cbhorto@ilstu.edu]
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 7:28 AM
To: Child Maltreatment Researchers
Subject: severity rating


Colleagues---

As part of planning a study which involves extensive CPS record reviews, I
am looking for input on how to rate the severity of maltreatment history.
Given the breadth of the study and the length of the measure for the
caseworker to complete, we do not have the luxury of coming up with a 20
item scale for each form of maltreatment, but want to go beyond simply
"yes" and "no" for the four forms we are interested in
	neglect
	sexual abuse
	physical abuse
	exposure to domestic violence
Could somebody recommend (and/or provide a cite) for a measure which
provides a method of relatively succinctly determining, for each form of
maltreatment, whether the experience was mild, moderate, severe (or some
similar continuum)?  

Thank you.

Connie Burrows Horton, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Psychology
Illinois State University