The Effect of Parental Drug Use in Society - Dissertation Example

Attitudes are important to understand when measuring prevalence since there may be a relationship between attitudes, perceptions, self-reporting, and experience of maltreatment. Previous studies have found that many people do not perceive childhood experiences such as “being whipped or beaten to the point of laceration” (Steele, 2001) as abuse, because there is a tendency to believe that the discipline they experienced was normal and deserved (Bower & Knutson, 2001). Subjective and objective definitions of maltreatment will give varying prevalence rates (Carlin et al., 2001). However, such factors should not affect responses to descriptive questions such as, “has anyone ever hit you with an object?

” This is reflected in discrepancies detected in studies where respondents are requested to reply to a range of selected violent behaviors and subsequently asked whether they rate themselves as abused. For example, a study of over 4,500 university students found that while 9% of the sample could be “conservatively” classified as physically abused, only 27% of this group also labelled themselves as abused (Berger, Knutson, Mehm, & Perkins, 2003). Experience of physical abuse has also been found to impact on attitudes toward the appropriateness of physical punishment.

People reporting histories of physical abuse, who rate their own experiences as deserved or normal, rate physical punishment as more appropriate than those who have not been so treated (Kelder, McNamara, Carlson, & Lynn, 2002).