title: Impact and detection of response distortions on parenting measures used to assess risk for child physical abuse.
abstract: This study investigates the impact of instructional conditions (fake good, be honest, fake bad, and respond randomly) on the scores of 3 parenting measures: the Adult/Adolescent Parenting Inventory (AAPI; Bavolek, 1984), the Child Abuse Potential (CAP) Inventory (Milner, 1986), and the Parenting Stress Index (PSI; Abidin, 1995) in general-population parents and at-risk parents. In addition, the study explores the ability of the PSI Defensiveness Scale and the CAP Inventory validity indexes to detect response distortions. As expected, most parenting-measure scores changed significantly as a result of parents' attempts to distort their responses. Across the response-distortion conditions, the PSI Defensiveness Scale only detected protocols in the fake-good condition with detection rates below 50%, whereas the CAP Inventory validity indexes correctly detected as invalid 94.7% and 91.1% of the protocols generated by general-population parents and at-risk parents, respectively. With regard to correct detection and labeling rates, except for the labeling of faking-bad behavior in the at-risk group (57.9% correct), the labeling rates of the CAP validity indexes for each of the response-distortion conditions in the general population and at-risk groups were acceptable, ranging from 82.4% to 100% correct.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Northern Illinois University, USA.
authors.forename: J S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Milner
authors.forename: J L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Crouch
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002649:Child Abuse / Q000175:diagnosis*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D016487:Parenting; D010290:Parents / Q000523:psychology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012647:Self-Assessment; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology