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RE: perceptions of child abuse
Does anyone have the specific child abuse perception study in a .pdf
format or something similar to send as an attachment to me? Otherwise,
can someone give the specific title of this study? This is great
information and I'd like to read up on the specifics...
Thank you in advance,
Andrea LeStarge
Drug Endangered Children/Meth Initiative
Federal Program Coordinator
United States Attorney's Office
Western District of Wisconsin
Office: 608-250-5449 / Cell: 608- 658-3471
andrea.lestarge@usdoj.gov
www.WisconsinDEC.org
"One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original
dimensions"
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
-----Original Message-----
From: bounce-3641212-9344767@list.cornell.edu
[mailto:bounce-3641212-9344767@list.cornell.edu] On Behalf Of Chaffin,
Mark J. (HSC)
Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 12:14 PM
To: 'Child Maltreatment Researchers'
Cc: 'Sheri McMahon'
Subject: perceptions of child abuse
An interesting survey study was cited in which the public was asked to
rate whether a behavior was "abusive" on a 1-5 scale. People rated
abusiveness at an average of 2.5 when the parent's behavior was in
response to public child misbehavior, as compared to 3.0 when it was
not. I think how you might interpret this sort of difference depends
among other things on what the midpoint (i.e. 3) of the 1-5 scale was.
If it's a neutral midpoint (e.g. "neither abusive nor non-abusive" or
something like that), then you have to be careful to interpret with an
eye toward what questionnaire researchers call the midpoint issue. That
is, the item may not reflect one dimension or construct, but two. For
example, on the classic strongly disagree to strongly agree 5-point
scale, a score of 2.5 vs. 2.0 does not reflect "more agreement," but
"weaker disagreement." It sounds semantic, but it's not. Someone who
disagrees is different from someone who agrees, and disagreement is not
just less agreement and vice versa. Same with perceptions of abusive
vs. non-abusive parenting. One classic example of the midpoint issue in
the child abuse research field was a survey of college males done long
ago that asked something along the lines of "if you knew you could get
away with it, would you commit rape?" on a strongly disagree-strongly
agree scale. The finding that people over the years cited from the
study was that a substantial number of college males indicated "some
willingness" to commit rape. Willingness here was defined as any
response other than "strongly disagree." The problem, of course, was
that virtually everybody disagreed with the idea of committing rape,
just to different strengths of disagreement....which is not the same
thing as saying that you have "some willingness."
Similarly, rating a behavior as neutral for abusiveness in one context
(3.0) and not abusive in another (2.5) is not necessarily the same thing
as saying that an abusive behavior was viewed as less abusive depending
on context. Many people may have felt the behavior was non-abusive in
both contexts, but felt slightly more confident in their assessment of
non-abusiveness when the context was public child misbehavior. It might
be informative to check the pattern of responses on the items, not just
the mean scores, and if possible to do within-subjects comparisons in
order to clarify this. Comparing mean scores makes assumptions that do
not account for the issues described above, especially when standard
statistical procedures are employed. An interesting and potentially
more informative look at responses to the item might ask, "how many
people judged the behavior to be abusive in one context, but shifted to
thinking it was non-abusive in the other?" My hypothesis is that this
number would be quite small.
MC
Mark Chaffin, Ph.D.
Professor of Pediatrics
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
P.O. Box 26901; CSC 225
Oklahoma City, OK 73190
(405) 271-8858
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