Child emotional aggression and abuse: definitions and prevalence

Objective

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.

Methods

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.

Results

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.

Conclusions

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.     

Making Poor Choices? Demand Rationalities and School Choice in a Chilean Local Education Market

Although the literature on school choice rationalities is extensive, different authors interpret the processes of school choice for poor families in different ways. Positions vary between those that consider that poor families have the same capacity to choose as middle class families and those that value structural factors as constraints for choice. The objective of this article is to identify different school choice rationalities of low income families in the context of a highly marketized education system such as Chile. Beyond the restrictions of a different nature that poor families face, this social group mostly expresses high levels of reflexivity and complex sets of preferences when it comes to choosing schools for their children. This article tries to overcome the dualistic division that prevails in school choice literature between choice as an outcome of utility maximization for all, and choice as a denial for deprived groups.     

Effectiveness of bilingual education in Cambodia: a longitudinal comparative case study of ethnic minority children in bilingual and monolingual schools

There is little research in the developing countries of South East Asia on the effectiveness of bilingual education programmes that use first language instruction for ethnic minority children. This study investigated the effectiveness of a bilingual education programme involving ethnic minority children in Cambodia by comparing their performance in mathematics, Khmer literacy and oral Khmer to their ethnic minority peers whose education is in the national language only. The findings show that students in the bilingual schools performed better in mathematics than their peers in the monolingual schools, but the differences in Khmer literacy and oral Khmer test scores were statistically insignificant. The study suggests that bilingual education using first language instruction could benefit academic development among ethnic minority students in Cambodia, at least in terms of mathematics achievement.     

Attitudes to the Use of Alternative Assessment Methods in Mathematics: A Study with Secondary Mathematics Teachers in Sydney,Australia

Given issues related to differences in learner characteristics, effective sampling across the content domain, and recent emphases on assessing meaningfully contextualised abilities and higher-order cognitive processes, the traditional mathematics test arguably does not provide a valid measure of student ability. Consequently, there is a need to incorporate alternative methods of assessment that are able to effectively assess the range of students mathematical abilities. The present study investigated methods of assessment used by 60 mathematics teachers from 11 secondary schools in metropolitan Sydney, as well as their attitudes to a range of alternative assessment methods, together with reasons why they would or would not implement these. Results showed that teachers were satisfied with traditional tests as valid measures of student ability, particularly for senior school years. Teachers generally did not favour implementing alternative assessment methods, although those with the least years teaching experience reported more positive attitudes. A major concern raised by teachers about the use of alternative assessment methods related to their perceived subjectivity. Explanations for these findings are advanced for teachers who have varying lengths of teaching experience.     

The Origins of Football in Spain: From the First Press Appearance to the Constitution of the First Clubs (1868–1903)

This research focuses on the origins of football in Spain and seeks to show how and where it was introduced in the country, to comprehend the historical context, and to understand why it took roots so rapidly despite the rivalry with the well-established tradition of bullfighting. The period of study spans from 1868 (first news piece on football in Spain) to 1903 (celebration of the first football championship in the country). The methodology focused primarily on identifying the primary sources and selecting the secondary sources, followed by the interpretative analysis and the mapping of football associations created in Spain in the sport’s early days. The large urban cities led the process of creating football clubs from 1889: Barcelona (61), Madrid (15), and Bilbao (9) steered the process of legitimization and institutionalization of football in the country. In the last 11 years of the nineteenth century (1889–1899), 29 clubs were created in 12 different cities. In the first four years of the twentieth century (1900–1903), a further 103 clubs mushroomed all over the country. Thus a total of 132 clubs were founded between 1889 and 1903 in Spain, which laid the necessary foundations for the implantation and legitimization of football.