Interpretations of child compliance in individuals at high- and low-risk for child physical abuse☆
Introduction
Theory predicts multiple pathways to the perpetration of child physical abuse and research has supported the importance of individual, family, community, and cultural factors in understanding abusive behavior (Belsky, 1993, Gelles, 1998, Milner & Dopke, 1997). The study of individual factors associated with child physical abuse generally examines the social interactive nature of abuse. That is, the focus has been on both parent and child characteristics associated with abuse. Many researchers (e.g., Bugental et al., 1990, Dietrich et al., 1990) posit that abusive parental behavior often occurs in reaction to difficult child behavior, but parental cognitions and affective reactions to the child are believed to be more important than the child behavior itself (Bugental et al., 1990). In an effort to delineate the cognitive and affective processes that may contribute to harsh discipline and child physical abuse, Milner, 1993, Milner, 2000 proposed a social information processing model that includes four stages: perception of behavior; expectations, interpretations, and evaluations that assign meaning to the behavior; information integration and response selection; and response implementation and monitoring. In Milner’s model, individuals who have committed child physical abuse and individuals at high-risk for child physical abuse are expected to process child-related information differently from individuals who have not committed child physical abuse and are at low-risk to do so. The hypothesized differences in information processing set the stage for escalation of conflict in parent-child interactions, more severe parental responses to child behavior, and the occurrence of abuse.
Evidence is accumulating to support the association between child physical abuse and many specific information processing activities (see Milner, 1993, Milner & Dopke, 1997). For example, data suggest that abusive and nonabusive parents differ in their expectations and evaluations of child behavior as well as the ways in which they integrate information, select responses, and implement responses in parent-child encounters. However, relatively little is known about how abusive and nonabusive parents differ in their interpretations of child behavior. There is some evidence that abusive and high-risk parents believe their children display more behavior problems (e.g., Bradley & Peters, 1991; Kolko, Kazdin, Thomas, & Day, 1993). However, it is not clear whether these beliefs reflect accurate assessments of the children’s behavioral and adjustment difficulties or biased interpretations of normative child behavior. Evaluating the accuracy of parental reports is made especially difficult because of the well-documented deleterious effects of abuse on children’s affect regulation, adjustment, attachment, and behavior (e.g., Herrenkohl et al., 1984, Kavanagh et al., 1988).
In the only two known studies directly comparing parent and observer reports of child behavior problems among children who have been abused (Mash et al., 1983, Reid et al., 1987), parents who had abused were found to report more behavior problems in their children than parents who had not abused whereas the reports of observers did not differ for abused and nonabused children. These data provide preliminary evidence that parents who have abused and those who have not abused differ in their interpretations of child behavior. However, parent reports in both studies were based on global ratings of child behavior over extended time periods whereas observer reports reflected discrete behaviors during a short time period. The lack of situational and behavior concordance between parent and observer reports in these studies makes direct comparison unfeasible (Richters, 1992) because abused children may exhibit behavior problems in the home environment that are not evident during observational sessions. To address the lack of situational and behavioral concordance that has hampered interpretation of earlier results, child behavior should be standardized or parent and observer reports should be based on the same samples of behavior.
We conducted two studies examining the interpretations of child behavior made by individuals at high- and low-risk to commit child physical abuse. We standardized the child behavior to be interpreted by providing participants with vignettes depicting parent-child interactions in which the child either complied or failed to comply with parental requests. We chose to focus on child compliance and noncompliance because child noncompliance is often cited as a precipitant to abusive incidents by parents (Dietrich et al., 1990; Herrenkohl, Herrenkohl, & Egolf, 1983; Kadushin & Martin, 1981). To strengthen the test of differences between individuals at high- and low-risk to commit child physical abuse in social information processing, we used a process-based methodology in addition to an experience-based methodology (McFall, Treat, & Viken, 1998). Experience-based methodologies typically measure cognitions through questionnaire formats and assume individuals are both willing and able to convey accurately introspective knowledge. In contrast, process-based methodologies do not make such assumptions (see Bargh & Chartrand, 1999, McFall et al., 1998) and, therefore, rely on observable information processing patterns to understand how information is processed. That is, experience-based studies tend to rely on questionnaires to obtain information, whereas process-based studies gather data in a controlled fashion and use established mathematical models to convey the nature of cognitive processing. We incorporated both experience- and process-based measures in our study using a signal detection paradigm to assess interpretations of child compliance and questionnaires to assess adults’ affective and behavioral reactions to child behavior. We chose to use the signal detection paradigm to evaluate difference in adult interpretations because standards for evaluating child compliance/noncompliance may be outside the participants’ awareness and therefore not easily articulated on experience-based questionnaires.
Signal detection theory (SDT) addresses the ways in which patterns are recognized under conditions of ambiguity and allows for the measurement of both accuracy and bias (Snodgrass & Corwin, 1988). The basic paradigm used in SDT research involves the presentation of a signal in a field of noise. In our studies participants read a series of vignettes in which half of the vignettes depicted a child complying with a parents’ request and half depicted a child not complying with the request. Compliant child behavior was the signal and noncompliant behavior was the noise. In the SDT paradigm “accuracy” refers to the proportion of correct decisions and includes “hits” (i.e., correctly identifying the signal) and “correct rejections” (i.e., not identifying the noise as signal). In our studies, participants who correctly identified many compliant behaviors as compliance and did not misidentify noncompliant behaviors as compliance received high accuracy scores. “Bias” in SDT indicates the type of errors people make in differentiating between signal and noise. Some people use a fairly liberal standard in identifying the signal and therefore make “false-alarm” errors in which they tend to identify noise as signal. In our studies, participants who used a liberal criterion would make false-alarm errors by identifying noncompliant behaviors as compliance. Other people use a conservative or strict standard and will make “miss” errors in which they fail to identify the signal. In our studies, participants who made miss errors would fail to identify instances of compliance. Based on Milner’s model and previous empirical findings (Mash et al., 1983, Reid et al., 1987), we predicted that individuals at high-risk to commit child physical abuse would be less accurate in identifying child compliance and use a more conservative criterion in deciding if a child complied to a parent’s request than individuals at low-risk to commit child physical abuse.
We tested our predictions in two samples using similar procedures. In Study 1, a sample of undergraduate women identified child compliance in a set of 34 written vignettes. In Study 2, a community sample of mothers of young children identified compliance in a set of 28 vignettes. In both samples, participants were designated as being at high-risk or low-risk to commit child physical abuse based on their scores on the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAP) (Milner, 1986). Although our primary goal was to examine interpretations of child behavior, we also assessed other reactions that have been associated with child physical abuse (Dopke & Milner, 2000, Milner, 1993, Milner, 2000). Specifically, measures of affect and behavioral reactions were included to examine whether high-risk participants reported more negative emotions and more punitive discipline in response to child behavior than low-risk participants.
Section snippets
Participants
Sixty-three female college students enrolled in undergraduate psychology courses at a medium sized public university participated in the study. Preliminary selection of participants involved eliminating protocols containing an invalid CAP (Milner, 1986; see the “Child Abuse Potential Inventory” section below for a description of the CAP), the criterion upon which study groups were formed. Of these, 23 were eliminated because their responses to CAP items produced an invalid profile. The percent
Results
Means, standard deviations, t tests, and effect sizes for the signal detection indices for high- and low-risk individuals are presented in Table 1. Contrary to expectations, high-risk individuals were not significantly different from low-risk individuals on the accuracy index. That is, the groups did not differ in the proportion of correct decisions made. The predicted difference on the bias index was significant, however, with high-risk, compared to low-risk, individuals using a more
Participants
To determine if the findings from a college sample would replicate with a parent sample, 80 mothers with a child between 2 and 5 years of age participated in a second study. Of these, 17 (21.25%) had invalid CAP protocols and were excluded from further analyses. In this sample, we used Milner’s (1986) recommended CAP cutoff score of 166 to assign mothers to the high-risk group. We attempted to use the recommended CAP score of 91 as the upper limit for a low-risk group; however, because of the
Results
As can be seen in Table 2, high-risk, compared to, low-risk mothers endorsed more stress in the parenting role, reported higher levels of negative affect, and reported greater use of hostile/coercive parenting. Moreover, mothers in the high-risk group reported a higher frequency of common child behavior problems in their own children and perceived those behaviors as more problematic than mothers in the low-risk group. High-risk mothers also reported lower levels of supportive/engaged parenting
General discussion
The present studies were designed to examine the role that interpretations of child behavior might play in harsh discipline and child physical abuse. Guided by Milner’s social information processing model (1993, 2000) and using a SDT paradigm, individuals at high-risk and low-risk to commit child physical abuse were compared on accuracy and bias in identifying child compliance and noncompliance. Risk groups were also compared on levels of negative affect and punitive and inductive discipline
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Authorship order was determined randomly and does not reflect relative contributions of the authors.
- 1
Study 2 is based on a thesis completed by Brad W. Lundahl under the supervision of M. Christine Lovejoy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree at Northern Illinois University.