NCJ Number
111373
Journal
Journal of Family Violence Volume: 2 Issue: 3 Dated: (September 1987) Pages: 239-255
Date Published
1987
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This paper examines recent child abuse studies and discusses fundamental ethical and procedural issues such as definition of population, specific problem under study, sex bias, recruitment of subjects, informed consent, deception, and confidentiality.
Abstract
Two major problems with child abuse research were noted. First, most of the published literature failed to include information that would be useful in assessing the practices and procedures followed. Secondly, in studies which did include procedural details, the scientific zeal to explore and understand the child abuse problem seemed to outweigh the subject's best interests. The author concludes that the absence of methodological information severely limits the reader's ability to interpret research results. The question of how best to define the population under study was examined using the psychiatric, sociological, and social-situational models represented in the literature. No single model was found to provide all the answers. On the question of gender of subjects, the literature review revealed that 78 percent of the reports used female populations exclusively, while in the remaining studies only 10 percent of the volunteers were male. The author argues that bias samples provide a poor knowledge base for theory building, eliminate half of the population under study, and oversimplify the problem. Most of the studies reviewed failed to provide any information as to what the volunteers were told before testing began. Table and 33 references.