Hierarchies of child maltreatment types at different perceived severity levels in European Americans, Korean Americans, and Koreans

Highlights

• Cultural definitions of severe, moderate, and mild levels of child abuse were coded.

• Prototypical types of abuse varied at each severity level within and between ethnicities.

• European Americans consistently placed greater emphasis on physical aggression.

• Koreans focused more on psychological aggression even when defining extreme abuse.

• Korean American responses were more like those of European Americans than Koreans.

Abstract

The main goal of this study was to compare differences within and between ethnic groups in their perspectives on what constituted child maltreatment and how severe (extreme, moderate, or mild) they perceived different types of maltreatment to be. A sample of 150 European American, Korean American, and Korean college students completed a survey asking them to give examples of parental behaviors that would be considered by people in their culture to be extreme, moderate, and mild forms of child abuse. The responses were coded for maltreatment types (e.g., physical, psychological, neglect) and subtypes (e.g., hitting). The frequency with which different types of maltreatment were considered abusive varied within ethnicity based on designated level of severity. These findings suggest that arbitrarily categorizing a child’s maltreatment experience into a rigid, pre-determined hierarchy of maltreatment types without considering the severity of different forms of maltreatment can result in overlooking valuable information. Moreover, fewer European Americans than Koreans identified psychological aggression as an extremely abusive type of abuse as well as in their total examples of abuse. European Americans placed greater emphasis on physical aggression, whereas Koreans focused more on psychological aggression and neglect. In perceptions of abuse, Korean Americans were more similar to European Americans than to Koreans. We recommend that when evaluating level of child abuse, investigators and researchers should take into account the different levels of severity within each type of maltreatment and the behaviors that are considered normative within different cultures.

Introduction

Making comparisons of child abuse across cultures and even across studies has been difficult because of the imprecision of definitions of abuse. The National Research Council (1993), pointing out the absence of clear operational definitions of child abuse, recommended quantifying relevant maltreatment dimensions, especially severity, rather than focusing on the simple presence or absence of maltreatment (Herrenkohl, 2005, Litrownik et al., 2005, Runyan et al., 2005). However, difficulties in defining maltreatment types and judging the severity of different forms of abuse continue to plague researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in this field (Arruabarrena and De Paúl, 2012, Herrenkohl and Herrenkohl, 2009, Litrownik et al., 2005, Sprang et al., 2005).

Some attention (e.g., Raman & Hodge, 2012) has been given to the possibility that views concerning the severity of different types of maltreatment differ across cultures. However, there is a dearth of actual cross-cultural studies focusing on ethnic differences in perspectives on child maltreatment (Elliott and Urquiza, 2006, Fakunmoju et al., 2013, Miller and Cross, 2006). In particular, there is a need for more qualitative research on ethnic minorities that can describe culturally-divergent ethnic groups and capture the complexity of cultural constructs (Ponterotto, 2002). This is important because particular cultural constructs and behaviors may be unique to the particular sociocultural contexts within which development occurs (Ponterotto, 2005). Surprisingly, to our knowledge, there have been no empirical studies examining different definitions or conceptions of child maltreatment types within and across cultures based on a bottom-up approach. To address this gap in the literature, we administered an open-ended survey asking participants to give examples of parental behaviors that would be considered by people in their culture to be extreme, moderate, and mild forms of child abuse. After coding these specific examples, we examined the hierarchy of maltreatment types perceived as abusive at different severity levels (i.e., extreme, moderate, and mild) within and between ethnic cultural groups (i.e., European American, Korean American, and Korean).