Psychology of Violence最新文献

Objective: The goal of this study was to determine if parents view spanking as a form of hitting and view hitting children as more acceptable than hitting other family members, including dogs.

Method: Parents of children 0-8 years of age from across the United States (N = 286; 85% White; 56% women) were recruited through Prolific to participate in an online survey.

Results: Although 90% of parents agreed with a definition of spanking that included the word "hitting" and 33% used the term "hitting" in their definitions of spanking, parents also rated spanking as less severe than hitting. The percentage of participants who agreed that it is acceptable for parents to hit children (30%) was significantly higher than the percentage that reported it was acceptable to hit other family members (dog, 17%; wife, 1%; parent with Alzheimer's, 0%; Tukey tests, p < .001). Nearly a third of parents reported that completing the survey had changed their beliefs about spanking.

Conclusions: This study demonstrated that American parents hold inconsistent beliefs about hitting children, including a judgment that it is more acceptable to hit a child than to hit a dog. These results exemplify the need for systemic parent education and policy interventions to bring children's human rights to live free from family violence in line with the recognized rights of adults.

Objective: Youth violence represents a significant public health problem that has serious and often lasting consequences for its victims and perpetrators. School-based interventions have considerable potential for playing a central role in prevention efforts. Although a variety of school-based interventions have shown some degree of success, further work is needed to improve their effectiveness. This article discusses several challenges that have impeded efforts to develop and evaluate school-based violence prevention programs and how these challenges might be addressed.

Method: This article draws upon theoretical and empirical research on youth violence to highlight critical issues that have limited efforts to develop effective school-based youth violence prevention programs.

Results: Applying a prevention science framework indicates that interventions are unlikely to be effective unless they target risk and protective factors most relevant to a specific population. Research on factors associated with youth violence suggests the need for comprehensive interventions that address risk and protective factors across multiple social-ecological domains. Subgroup differences in the effects of school-based violence prevention programs indicate the need for a better understanding of differences in patterns of risk and protective factors both across and within populations.

Discussion: Improving the effectiveness of school-based youth violence prevention programs will require an iterative process to identify subgroups of individuals across and within populations that differ in their patterns of risk and protective factors, to refine logic models to guide the development of interventions tailored to specific populations, and to evaluate interventions using designs that examine variability in intervention effects across subgroups.

Objective: After nearly a half of a century of work to develop effective approaches to prevent sexual violence, there is still considerable progress to be made. Prevention approaches are often universal in nature despite recognition of the need for targeted approaches. Behavioral outcomes are not routinely assessed in evaluations. Further, effective prevention programs are not widely disseminated, and some programs being implemented have not sustained evaluation. Closing the research to practice gap is a critical next step for the field.

Method: This commentary discusses how implementation science theories and methods can help to advance the development, evaluation and dissemination of evidence-based sexual assault prevention approaches.

Results: Implementation science principles and concepts can advance the development of sexual assault prevention programs by prioritizing stakeholder engagement, systematically adapting evidence-based programs, and designing for dissemination and sustainability. The evaluation of sexual assault prevention approaches by prioritizing hybrid designs that move beyond efficacy and effectiveness trials, attending to the factors that influence implementation outcomes, and better understanding the processes through which fidelity is achieved in program implementation. Implementation science can also be utilized to facilitate dissemination and de-implementation of programs, understand the barriers to uptake, and facilitate scale up.

Conclusion: Integration of implementation science principles and concepts into efforts to develop, evaluate and disseminate sexual assault prevention programs is an important for speeding progress in sexual assault prevention, towards the goal of ultimately reducing rates of sexual violence.

Objective: In this Perspectives article, we outline a collaborative research program aimed at a more refined understanding of the proximal factors involved in alcohol-facilitated intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration.

Method: We provide a summary of our research experiences and offer recommendations regarding studies aiming to understand what we term "the how question," which focuses on applying research methods that allow for the investigation of the potential causal mechanisms that underlie the well-established link between heavy alcohol use and IPV perpetration.

Results: We suggest several "gold standard" research methods that allow researchers to yield useful information about how alcohol may cause IPV perpetration, but that are infrequently applied in this research area.

Conclusions: We conclude by reviewing several factors limiting our understanding of the proximal determinants of alcohol-facilitated IPV, including issues relating to sampling, definition, inclusiveness, and the dyadic nature of IPV.

Objective: There is ample evidence for associations among childhood family violence and adult intimate partner violence (IPV) use. This study was designed to examine potential differential associations between childhood physical abuse, childhood sexual abuse, witnessing parental IPV, posttraumatic stress symptom (PTSS) severity, and IPV use for men and women veterans.

Method: Survey data from 825 veterans who participated in a longitudinal multisite investigation of post-9/11 veterans who completed measures of childhood family violence history, PTSS, IPV use and experiences were used. Moderation analysis in hierarchical linear regression tested whether men veterans with childhood family violence had higher rates of IPV use than women veterans. A gender-stratified causal mediation was conducted to test whether PTSS severity mediated the relationships among childhood family violence types and IPV use for men and women.

Results: Women veterans reported significantly higher rates of all forms of childhood family violence than men, but there were no significant gender differences in rates of reported IPV use. PTSS severity did not mediate the association between childhood family violence types and adult IPV use for men or women. For men PTSS severity was the only factor significantly positively associated with IPV use. Childhood sexual abuse was the only factor significantly positively associated with IPV use for women.

Conclusions: These differential findings for men and women veterans support screening and intervention based on gender for veterans accessing VA healthcare and the need for interventions that address childhood trauma, PTSS and IPV within the VA healthcare system.