On 25 Jul 2004, Jennifer wrote:

Doan wrote in message ...

Regurgitated propaganda. Dare to discuss the Struas & Mouradian (1998)
study?

I would like to know more about spanking studies that come to sensible
conclusions. Go ahead and post it!


I would recommend you to look up the October 1996 issue of Pediatrics.
You might also want to look up the recent study, Baumrind & Owens (2001):

To Summarize These Results:
--------------------------
"Prior to removing the few parents whose use of physical punishment was
unusually severe for this population and controlling the methodological
artifacts that could account for the associations, frequency of physical
punishment was associated with detrimental child outcomes, as antispanking
advocates such as Straus claim." However, once the Red zone families were
removed, there were few significant associations left to explain between
child outcomes and dimensional or categorical measures of NORMATIVE physical
punishment. Furthermore, the correlations with detrimental child outcomes
of physical punishment did not exceed those of verbal punishment. When
alternative explanations, including the adolescents' self-reported favorable
perception of their parents, are considered, there are NO effects of NORMATIVE
PHYSICAL PUNISHMENT on child or adolescent outcomes. The apparent effects of
NPP are explained by baseline child misbehavior and third variables that
contribute to a pattern of rejection and overcontrol in which reliance on
physical punishment is embedded. The 3 children (all girls) of parents
who totally abstainted from spanking at all time points, were not more
competent by adolescence than the whose parents spanked occasionally. All
were prosocial but two were very low on self-assertiveness and the one who
was self-assertive and achievement-oriented manifested severe internalizing
and externalizing symptoms. Unexpectedly, even the presence of above-average
frequency of normative physical punishment represented by the Orange zone
did not attenuate at all the positive outcomes associated with Authoritative
or Democratic parenting. Thus we found no evidence for unique detrimental
effects of normative physical punishment.

To my knowledge this is the only study using high quality data in a prospective
longitudinal design to assess the effects of normative physical punishment,
after controlling for the following methodological artifacts: shared source
variance, the intervention selection bias introduced by baseline child
misbehavior, and plausible thir parenting variables that were associated with
both frequency of use of normative physical punishment and detrimental child
outcomes. This is one of the few studies to contrast the effects of normative
physical punishment with another aversive disciplinary intervention, and to
contrast the effects of "no spanking" with those "low frequency" spanking.


Doan