The Use of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory in the Assessment of Parents involved in Care Proceedings

Assessing for potential physical abuse is a fundamental task for those professionals undertaking assessments of parents involved in care proceedings. One tool developed to help assist in this endeavour is the Child Abuse Potential (CAP) Inventory (Milner, 1980 , 1986 ). The CAP Inventory provides an estimate of parental risk of child abuse and is one of the most widely used psychometric tools by psychologists in child protection settings. This review evaluates the psychometric properties of this measure and provides an overview of its potential uses, as well as its limitations. It concludes that there is evidence to support the validity and reliability of the CAP Inventory for use in care proceedings. Specifically, the review indicates that the CAP Inventory has good levels of reliability and validity (construct, content and concurrent). The only aspect of validity for which there is a lack of evidence is that of predictive validity and this is due to a dearth of prospective studies. Given the above, the practical, clinical and ethical implications for the use of the CAP Inventory in the assessment of parents involved in care proceedings are discussed. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Citing Literature

Number of times cited according to CrossRef: 3

• Amanda H. Costello, Natalie J. Shook, Nancy M. Wallace, Cheryl B. McNeil, Examining factors associated with elevated Lie Scale responding on the Child Abuse Potential Inventory, Child Abuse & Neglect, 10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.10.009, 76 , (56-64), (2018). Crossref
• Jane V. Appleton, Peter Sidebotham, Physical Abuse of Children, Child Abuse Review, 10.1002/car.2505, 26 , 6, (405-410), (2017). Wiley Online Library
• Jane V. Appleton, Working Alongside One Another…, Child Abuse Review, 10.1002/car.2416, 24 , 5, (313-316), (2015). Wiley Online Library

Volume 24 , Issue 5 September/October 2015

Pages 332-345     

Cultivators of Change: Food Justice in Social Work Education

Food security is an important social work issue historically, and social work educators are responsible for teaching a curriculum that ensures social workers advance human rights, social justice, and economic justice. Contemporary food justice work focuses on the intersecting issues of policy, health, social justice, economic development, and the natural environment. The long-term global public health and environmental threats posed by the mainstream food system in combination with increasing poverty and food insecurity have led to questions about the ability of communities to sustain a nutritionally adequate and equitably distributed food supply. This paper provides examples of social work courses, units, and assignments that focus on educating students about food and environmental justice issues. Much of this work is based on service learning, which is an effective pedagogical tool for fostering connections between classroom concepts and practice. Courses that help students understand the contextual environments in their local communities provide optimal learning environments to address social, economic, and environmental injustices in the food system. Food justice, in particular, is one lens by which students can learn about environmental justice issues for application to their future practice.     

The Production of Inequality: The Gender Division of Labor Across the Transition to Parenthood

Using longitudinal time diary and survey data from a community sample of dual‐earner couples across the transition to parenthood, the authors examined change in divisions of paid and unpaid work and assessed the accuracy of survey data for time use measurement. Mothers, according to the time diaries, shouldered the majority of child care and did not decrease their paid work hours. Furthermore, the gender gap was not present prebirth but emerged postbirth with women doing more than 2 hours of additional work per day compared to an additional 40 minutes for men. Moreover, the birth of a child magnified parents' overestimations of work in the survey data, and had the authors relied only on survey data, gender work inequalities would not have been apparent. The findings have important implications for (a) the state of the gender revolution among couples well positioned to obtain balanced workloads and (b) the utility of survey data to measure parents' division of labor.     

YOU ARE CLOSE TO YOUR RIVAL AND EVERYBODY HATES A WINNER: A STUDY OF RIVALRY IN COLLEGE FOOTBALL

We use a recent survey of college (American) football fans to study rivalry, where we find the most intense rivalries occur between in‐state teams. Relatedly, within a conference fans are more likely to target rivalrous feelings toward the winningest teams and, in Bowl Championship Series conferences, teams who have been conference members for a longer proportion of time. While the stakes are different from other settings, such as warring nations, college football teams compete for resources and often have loyal followings with strong emotional ties. Thus, examining rivalrous feeling in this setting provides insights into rivalry more generally besides being of interest in its own right as college football is a multi‐billion dollar industry. (JEL L22, L83)     

The Impact of Electronic Communication and Social Media on Child Welfare Practice

One hundred and thirty-six child welfare workers completed an online survey examining their experiences regarding the impact that electronic communication and social media use has had on their practice with youth and families. Workers reported e-mail and text message use have made work with youth easier, yet distinct difficulties have emerged for practitioners in relation to electronic communication and social media use. New elements have also emerged including issues with harassment and the ethics related to monitoring clients' online activities. Comparisons with a previous study conducted by Finn indicate that the use of technology within social work practice has evolved over time. Implications for social work practice and future research are also discussed.     

Seeking Construct Validity in Interpersonal Trust Research: A Proposal on Linking Theory and Survey Measures

This paper highlights the under-emphasised connection between theoretical conceptualisations and empirical operationalisations in the field of trust research. The paper proposes a matching of specific surveys measures with conceptualisations in order to work towards a more theoretically-informed empirical study of interpersonal trust. The work examines five widely-used survey measures of trust, and considers whether they are likely to operationalise conceptualisations of trust that are broadly more ‘strategic’ or more ‘moralistic’ in nature. It is argued that these trust questions, which are frequently used interchangeably, are likely to differ substantially from each other in terms of their conceptual underpinnings. This expectation is tested by examining the association between interpersonal trust and gender across seven UK social surveys. Findings indicate that the trust questions indeed have different associations with gender, providing support for the idea that some questions map more closely onto ‘strategic’ conceptualisations of trust, whilst others map more closely onto ‘moralistic’ conceptualisations. Implications of these findings are explored in the context of the search for construct validity in trust research.     

The Development of Math–Race Stereotypes: “They Say Chinese People Are the Best at Math”

Sixty elementary‐school children (9–10 years old) and 82 adolescents (12–13 years old) completed explicit and implicit measures of racial stereotypes about math. 60 Asian, 42 Latino, 21 White, 15 Black, and four multiracial students participated (42% boys). On the explicit measure, children as early as fifth grade reported being aware of the stereotype that Asians = math, but only adolescents personally endorsed this stereotype. On the implicit measure, there was significant evidence for racial stereotypes about math among adolescents. Across both ages, individual students’ explicit awareness of the stereotype was significantly correlated with their implicit stereotypes. Early adolescence is a key developmental window for discussing stereotypes before they become endorsed as personal beliefs.     

The Persistence of Wives’ Income Advantage

Recent reports using cross‐sectional data indicate an increase in the percentage of wives who outearn their husbands, yet we know little about the persistence of wives’ income advantage. The present analyses utilize the 1990 – 1994 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (N= 3,481) to examine wives’ long‐term earnings advantage. Although a significant minority of women outearn their husbands in 1 year, considerably fewer do so for 5 consecutive years. The presence and persistence of wives’ income advantage vary by demographic characteristics, economic and human capital measures, and over the individual and marital life course. The findings suggest caution in interpreting women’s relative economic gains as signaling absolute progress toward eliminating gender inequality within marriages.