Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 24, Issue 3, March 2000, Pages 411-423
Child Abuse & Neglect

Spotlight on Practice
The veridicality of punitive childhood experiences reported by adolescents and young adults

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0145-2134(99)00153-2Get rights and content

Abstract

Objective: The primary goal of the present research was to determine whether retrospective reports of childhood disciplinary experiences and perceptions of that discipline correspond to actual childhood events and whether the accuracy of that report was influenced by the affective state of the respondent.

Method: Eighty-three adolescent and young adult males completed a retrospective measure of physical child maltreatment, Assessing Environments (AEIII), and the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI). As children the participants had been observed naturalistically in their homes interacting with their parents an average of 10 years earlier.

Results: Analyses were consistent with the hypothesis that both current mood and actual observations of parent-child interactions during childhood predict self-reported recollections of childhood maltreatment by one’s parents. Further the veridicality of such recollections appears to depend upon the objective specificity versus the perceptive nature of the questions used to elicit the recollections.

Conclusions: The findings suggest that assessment instruments suitable for obtaining information regarding earlier childhood victimization must utilize behaviorally specific items. Thus, items that are either global or intimate a normative comparison should be avoided.

Section snippets

Sample

Research participants comprised a subsample of 83 young men from a sample of 116 subjects participating in a long-term follow-up assessment. The boys and their families had participated in clinical and normative studies of aggressive and antisocial children between 1964 and 1982. Thus, the families were drawn from among samples described in earlier research conducted at OSLC Bank et al 1991, Bank et al 1996, Patterson et al 1982. To be eligible for the present study, the youths had to have

Results

For descriptive purposes, means and standard deviations for Time 1 and Time 2 variables are listed in Table 2. Note that the Nattering and ABC means, and the Mother TAB score are rate-per-min scores, whereas BSI Depression is a z-score derived from available age-appropriate normative data, and AEIII scale scores are raw scores. Not surprisingly, the clinic-referred sample had higher Nattering and ABC scores, providing evidence for the utility of combining the samples in the present research to

Discussion

The findings of this study are consistent with the hypothesis that both current mood and actual observations of parent-child interactions uniquely predict self-reported recollections of childhood experiences of maltreatment by one’s parents. Further, the content validity of such recollections appears to depend, at least in part, upon the objective specificity versus the perceptive nature of the scales used to obtain the retrospective report. The AEIII (Berger et al., 1988) scales, the PP, PD,

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgments—The authors thank Margaret Lathrop and Jon Baker for the care with which these data were collected, and Kristin Greenley who was responsible for data management.

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    Support was provided by MH46690 from the Prevention Research Branch; MH50714 from the Personality and Social Processes Research Branch; and MH40024 from the Center for Studies of Violent Behavior and Traumatic Stress, National Institute of Mental Health, US Public Health Service.

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