Читать книгу Pediatric Epidemiology - Группа авторов - Страница 33

In their analysis of 54 representative population studies from 39 countries, Hovdestad et al. [10] found evidence for reliability and/or validity of the childhood maltreatment assessments in only 7 studies. Despite the availability of well-established checklists of life events, they are seldom used and the psychometric properties of nearly all measures are uncertain. A further complication is that maltreatment in childhood usually is of multiple types and single-item measurements are associated with underreporting [24]. Widom and Shephard [25] compared retrospective self-reports of early child maltreatment with official court and police records. When using severe/very severe violence subscales, individuals who were physically abused according to official records reported significantly higher rates of abuse than those who were not registered in official records. There was, however, a substantial group of physically abused individuals who underreported – almost 40%. Whether these people did not report because of embarrassment, a wish to protect parents, a sense of having deserved the abuse, a conscious wish to forget the past, or lack of confidence in or rapport with the interviewer, is not known.

Some respondents might have been too young at the time of the abuse to remember it correctly and it is important to realise that what we remember from early childhood may be heavily dependent on information told us later in childhood, constructed by a parent, or both.

On the other hand, when using a minor violence subscale, there was a very high rate of false positives. This means that the evaluation method has a direct influence of answers given [25].