The self-report of punitive childhood experiences of young adults and adolescents

Abstract

A questionnaire designed to assess childhood disciplinary experiences was administered to a large sample of university students. The responses of these subjects indicated many of these predominately middle-class young adults had experienced disciplinary activities that could be considered abusive. The results provide prevalence data on child abuse histories in a nonclinical sample and were seen as supporting the idea that physical abuse of children is widespread and not restricted to groups identified on the basis of clinical service or social deviance. Regardless of the criterion for physical abuse applied to the data, most respondents who met a criterion for having been abused failed to label themselves as having been abused. Additionally, correlations between severe physical punishment and abuse-related domains were shown to obtain in these nonclinical samples in a manner consistent with descriptions of abusive families in the clinical literature. A second study conducted with truly abused and nonabused adolescents established the validity of the questionnaire approach used in this research, and the two studies indicated the feasibility of conducting research on physical child abuse in natural collectivities of nonclinical subjects.