Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, NY 11794-2500, USA.
Child Abuse Negl. 2011 Oct;35(10):783-96. doi: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2011.07.002. Epub 2011 Oct 20.
Research on and intervention for child emotional abuse and emotional aggression toward children have been severely hampered because there have been no agreed-upon, clinically usable definitions.
We have (a) proposed and field-tested a set of criteria to operationally define child emotional abuse for clinical settings and (b) used these criteria to design a parent-report measure of parental emotional aggression and child emotional abuse that could be used in research. In this paper, we review the development and field trials of these criteria for making substantiation decisions.
Agreement between master reviewers and field decisions was extremely high in a 5-site development trial (96% agreement, κ=.89) and a 41-site dissemination trial (90% agreement, κ=.73). We compare these criteria to other research criteria in the literature. We then present data collected using a self-report measure designed to parallel these criteria from an anonymous online survey of US Air Force personnel and their spouses. The final sample (N=52,780) was weighted to be representative of the United States civilian population. The prevalence of parents' emotionally aggressive acts was much higher than the prevalence of emotional abuse (acts plus impact), but rates of parents' acts of emotional aggression were lower than those typically reported in the literature. Additional analyses tested for differential effects due to gender of perpetrator (i.e., mothers or fathers), age of victim, and clustering within families. These factors did not drive rates of aggression or abuse.
In sum, the criteria developed and proposed appear to support reliable clinical decision making regarding child emotional abuse and can be translated to research survey tools that better capture the continuum of parents' emotional aggression and child emotional abuse than the measures that are currently available, advancing the state of the science with respect to child emotional abuse.
由于缺乏共识且临床上可用的定义，针对儿童情感虐待和对儿童的情感侵犯的研究和干预受到了严重阻碍。
我们提出并测试了一套操作性定义儿童情感虐待的标准，以便在临床环境中使用（a），并使用这些标准设计了一种父母报告的父母情感侵犯和儿童情感虐待的测量工具，可用于研究。在本文中，我们回顾了这些标准在做出证实决策方面的发展和现场试验。
在 5 个地点的发展试验（96%的一致性，κ=.89）和 41 个地点的传播试验（90%的一致性，κ=.73）中，主审评者和现场决策之间的一致性极高。我们将这些标准与文献中的其他研究标准进行了比较。然后，我们展示了使用一种自我报告的测量工具收集的数据，该工具旨在与这些标准平行，从美国空军人员及其配偶的匿名在线调查中收集。最终样本（N=52780）经过加权，以代表美国的平民人口。父母情感侵犯行为的发生率远高于情感虐待（行为加影响）的发生率，但父母情感侵犯行为的发生率低于文献中通常报道的发生率。进一步的分析检验了由于施害者的性别（即母亲或父亲）、受害者的年龄以及家庭内的聚类等因素而导致的差异效应。这些因素并没有导致攻击或虐待的发生率增加。
总之，所提出和开发的标准似乎支持针对儿童情感虐待的可靠临床决策，并且可以转化为研究调查工具，这些工具比当前可用的工具更能捕捉父母情感侵犯和儿童情感虐待的连续体，从而在儿童情感虐待方面推进科学的发展。
