The Comprehensive Childhood Maltreatment Inventory: early development and reliability analyses.
OBJECTIVE
Our goal was to develop a reliable measure of childhood maltreatment that could be used to evaluate retrospective memories among adults across a broad range of potentially abusive caregiver behaviors.


METHODS
These behaviors were organized into 31 items that query age at onset, frequency across 4 developmental periods, relationship of the perpetrator(s), and respondents' perception of the experience. Additional factors directly relevant to each of the individual 4 categories of childhood maltreatment were also queried.


RESULTS
Preliminary data collected from 95 college students, find the measure to have excellent test-retest reliability, and 2 of 4 subscales to possess adequate internal consistency.


CONCLUSIONS
Reasons for low internal consistency for the Physical Maltreatment and Physical Neglect categories and the relative importance of test-retest reliability as compared to internal consistency in a questionnaire of this type are discussed.
Riddle
K P
KP
Psychology Department, University of Louisville, KY 40292, USA. Kpriddle22@aol.com
Aponte
J F
JF
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002649:Child Abuse / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires