Citation

Miller TR, Handal PJ, Gilner FH, Cross JF. J. Fam. Violence 1991; 6(4): 351-363.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, St. Louis University, 221 North Grand Boulevard, 63103 St. Louis, Missouri

Copyright

(Copyright © 1991, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/BF00980538

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A number of social and psychological factors present in most adolescent parents place them at high risk for abusive behavior toward their children. However, current child abuse potential measures do not include adolescent samples as part of the psychometric data base. Consequently, the purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to investigate whether a Black adolescent sample would perform differently than an adult nonabusing sample on the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (CAP), and (2) to examine the relationship between history of abuse or witnessing violence to scores on the CAP. Results revealed that Black adolescents scored significantly higher than the adult normative sample on the CAP; consequently, cutoff scores need to be empirically established for adolescents. Additional analyses indicated that a history of abuse, as well as a history of witnessing violence, are associated with a high potential for abuse.