Quote:
Originally Posted by RandyMarsh
Well the official definition of the word is "punishment of a physical nature, such as caning, flogging, or beating" And smacking a child lightly once in a blue moon because no other means of discipline is working is entirely different from "beating" a child.
As for the definition they used in studies... well if they're making up their own definition for words I'd hate to think what they make up to support their 'study'. How many of these studies included kids with abusive parents who were beaten often? I'd bet my house the vast majority fell into that category or a similar one as opposed to a light spanking once every few years because they have done something awful repeatedly and aren't responding to the usual forms of discipline (grounding etc).
|
A way you could do such a study could be to record different variables, for example trying to quantify the capacity for violence for example or how depressed the people in the study are. Then also record whether or not they were corporally punished as kids, preferably in a quantitative way, for example from 1 being never to 10 being very often. Perhaps they differentiate between different kinds of corporal punishment, like beatings or spankings. Then they add to that data more variables like wealth, whether or not the parents were violent towards eachother, whether or not they were alcoholics and so on so to reduce the amount of possible hidden variables which may have an effect on the study.
Through various statistical analyses, you can f.ex make regression models from such data which is able to make predictions. For example, a model might say that a kid who gets beaten so and so often is likely to become
this depressed or this violent towards his or her spouse with a standard deviation of
that (standard deviation basically tells the uncertainty of the model). If you can say with a certainty of 95% or more that corporal punishment f.ex explains violence in later life, that result is considered scientifically significant and something you can use as a basis for a conclusion. 95% certainty is a standard in science meaning any conclusion you can draw from a study should have at least a 95% likelihood of being true.
This could be a general way to do it, but several studies have tested this in different ways. The people doing these studies are not complete idiots and when you have a significant amount of studies dating back to the 50s that show negative effects of corporal punishment on society, you should open your mind a bit to the possibility that they may be on to something. Suffice to say that when a country like Sweden decided to prohibit corporal punishment in the 70s, that decision was based on more than mere opinion and we know a lot more about the effects of spanking and other forms of corporal punishment now than we did today.
It's a difficult lesson to teach people because it rouses feelings and invades intimate family privacy. No parent likes to hear that what they did or are doing to their kids may cause long term damage, so telling people about it is not enough. You also have to battle their old fashioned ideas and their wishes to live a life in denial where their parenting decisions to smack and spank were/are right. Noone wants to be a bad parent.
Linear Mode
