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Affiliation
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Department of Global Health Promotion, Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU), 1-5-45 Yushima, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113-8519, Japan. fujiwara.hlth@tmd.ac.jp. |
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Abstract
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PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between community-level social capital and physical abuse towards children, and the mediating effect of parental psychological distress by multilevel mediation analyses.
METHODS: We analyzed data from a population-based study of first-grade elementary school children (6-7 years old) in Adachi City, Tokyo, Japan. The caregivers of first-grade students from all elementary schools in Adachi City (N = 5355) were asked to respond to a questionnaire assessing parents' self-reported physical abuse (beating and hitting) and neighborhood social capital. Among them, 4291 parents returned valid responses (response rate 80.1%). We performed multilevel analyses to determine the relationships between community-level parental social capital and physical abuse, and further multilevel mediation analyses were performed to determine whether parental psychological distress mediated the association.
RESULTS: Low community-level social capital was positively associated with physical abuse (both beating and hitting) after adjustment for other individual covariates (beating: middle, OR = 1.54, 95% CI 1.11-2.13; low, OR = 1.33, 95% CI 0.94-1.88; and hitting: middle, OR = 1.35, 95% CI 1.02-1.80; low, OR = 1.16, 95% CI 0.86-1.57). Multilevel mediation analyses revealed that community-level parental psychological distress did not mediate the association (indirect effect ß = 0.10, 95% CI - 0.10 to 0.29, p = 0.34 for beating; ß = 0.03, 95% CI - 0.16 to 0.23, p = 0.74 for hitting).
CONCLUSIONS: Fostering community-level social capital might be important for developing a strategy to prevent child maltreatment, which may have a direct impact on abusive behavior towards children.
Language: en |