Faculty Bibliography

Physical aggression toward a child and a partner within the same family occurs more frequently than once thought, In community samples, the co-occurrence rate appears to be 5% to 6%; in clinical samples, it may be more than 50%. The possibility of causal connections between and common predictors of the two problems is real. Despite data demonstrating a consistent relation between aggression toward a child and aggression toward a partner, research and clinical services are not well coordinated. We discuss ways research could benefit from greater awareness of co-occurring aggression, comment on issues related to assessing families for presence of co-occurring aggression or abuse, and describe approaches to intervention that take advantage of what we know about common correlates of parent and partner aggression. Finally, we acknowledge fledgling collaborative efforts by service agencies to keep both children and parents safe and offer suggestions for training clinicians to address co-occurring aggression.

Divorce prediction studies (e.g., Gottman, Coan, Carrere, & Swanson, 1998) suggest that couples' eventual divorce can be very accurately predicted from a number of different variables. Recent attention to these studies has failed to consider the need to crossvalidate prediction equations and to consider the prevalence of divorce in the population. We analyze archival data to demonstrate that accuracy and predictive value drops precipitously during crossvalidation. We conclude that results of studies without crossvalidation analyses should be interpreted with extreme caution, no matter how impressive the initial results appear to be.

Aggression in dating relationships is associated with attitudes that justify its use. Attitudes about dating aggression are targeted by prevention efforts, contributing to a need to measure these attitudes sensitively, accurately, and multidimensionally. We describe two new measures of attitudes about aggression, each tapping different attitudinal components, and compare their psychometric properties with an existing scale. The 1st assesses attitudes about physical aggression in provocative situations. The 2nd taps attitudes about verbally aggressive, controlling, and jealous tactics against a dating partner. Data from 2,313 high school students were factor analyzed and cross-validated for each new scale. Compared with an existing measure, the scales had comparable levels of reliability and validity and improved response distributions. A 2nd-order factor analysis lends support to a multidimensional view of attitudes about dating aggression.

Research and treatment for partner abuse and child abuse are relatively distinct enterprises, yet when the theoretical and research literatures related to these two forms of family violence are examined together, the likelihood of meaningful associations is strikingly apparent. Partner abuse and child abuse co-occur more often than one might expect by chance, and in the context of overlapping theories and risk factors, this suggests that a more integrated conceptualization might be fruitful. We summarize and provide a framework for describing the large number of similar predictors of partner and child abuse, identify some potentially interesting dyadic differences, comment on how our research methodologies could address an integrated area of family violence, and suggest some directions for future research and treatment.

This study explored the factor structure of a modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS; M. A. Straus, 1979) in a large multiethnic high school sample. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic approaches were used. Results generally supported 2-factor models for males and females. A substantial proportion of residual variance remained after the 2 primary factors were extracted, and correlations among this residual Variance suggested meaningful differences in the perpetration and experience of dating violence for males and females. Furthermore, the factor structure for males' self-reported victimization suggested that items representing psychological and mild physical aggression, which loaded on 1 factor, may be perceived similarly. Convergent validity analyses that examined the correlation among CTS traditional and factor scores with jealous actions,control tactics, and attitudes justifying males' and females' use of dating aggression provided initial support for the constructs identified. Results are discussed in terms of improving measurement of dating aggression.

The association between children's externalizing behavior problems and mothers' overreactive discipline was examined in a longitudinally assessed sample of toddlers and their mothers. Path analyses indicated that mothers' overreactive discipline and children's externalizing behaviors were significantly and similarly stable over a 2 1/2-year period. No evidence of a cross-time influence of either variable on the other was observed. Mothers' overreactive discipline at Time 2 had a significant effect on Time 2 externalizing behavior. No significant effects of children's behavior on mothers' discipline were found. Mothers' depressive symptomatology and marital discord predicted initial overreactivity and were related to externalizing problems through their relations to overreactivity. The results support the appropriateness of implementing parenting interventions for externalizing problems before age 2 years.

To address the direction of causality underlying the robust association of mothers' attributions for child misbehavior and mothers' parenting, mothers' child-centered responsibility attributions for their hard-to-manage toddlers' misbehavior were experimentally manipulated. Mothers and children were then videotaped interacting in typical but challenging situations. Relative to mothers who were told that their children were not to blame for misbehaving, mothers who were told that their children would misbehave voluntarily and with negative intent were rated as significantly more overreactive in their discipline and felt angrier; their children exhibited higher rates of negative affect. Therefore, mothers' attributions for children's misbehavior can determine the harshness of their discipline. Further research on attribution-focused interventions and their role in facilitating treatment response and maintenance in parenting programs is warranted.

A model of the development and maintenance of overreactive and lax parental discipline styles was tested in a sample of 40 mothers of toddlers by assessing mothers' arousal to and attributions for videotaped scenes of children expressing negative affect and by examining these data in relation to self-reported parenting style. The dysfunctionality of mothers' child-centered attributions for the child negative affect accounted for a significant portion of the variance in mothers' emotional arousal and their overreactive/harsh parenting. However, the dysfunctionality of mothers' mother-centered attributions did not account for a significant portion of the variance in mothers' lax parenting. These findings suggest that emotions and cognitions play important roles in maintaining overreactive or harsh parenting. Interventions aimed at altering parenting behavior may be more effective if they address emotional arousal and attributions as well as teach appropriate parenting strategies.