NCJ Number
205555
Journal
Child Abuse & Neglect Volume: 25 Issue: 8 Dated: August 2001 Pages: 1015-1036
Date Published
August 2001
Length
22 pages
Annotation
This study examined several components of a social information-processing model of child physical abuse to determine the extent to which high-risk mothers differed from low-risk mothers in their evaluations, attributions, negative affect, and disciplinary choices for children's behavior.
Abstract
Nineteen mothers at high risk for child physical abuse and 19 matched mothers at low risk for perpetrating such abuse read 6 vignettes that depicted a child engaging in moral, conventional, and personal transgressions. Half of the vignettes contained mitigating information and half did not. Measures were obtained on nine dependent variables that consisted of evaluations of wrongness of the child's transgression, hostile/nonhostile intent, stable/unstable, global/specific, internal/external attributions, feelings of indifference, aversiveness, annoyance, and choice of disciplinary action. As hypothesized, high-risk mothers reported more negative affect (aversiveness and annoyance) toward child transgressions. High-risk mothers assessed conventional and personal transgressions as more wrong than did low-risk mothers, but the groups were similar in their evaluations of moral transgressions. High-risk mothers also selected more power-assertive disciplinary techniques than low-risk mothers. These findings support a social-information processing model of child physical abuse, which suggests that high-risk mothers compared to low-risk mothers process child-related information differently and use more power-assertive disciplinary techniques. 5 tables and 63 references