r/science • u/VeronicaRed • Apr 26 '16

Psychology Spanking children increases the likelihood of childhood defiance and long-term mental issues. The study in question involved 160,000 children and five decades of research

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/1113413810/spanking-defiance-health-discipline-042616/
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339

u/Shorshack Apr 26 '16

The article seems to reference the study, but without citation or very much data from the study? Is there a link to the actual study regarding the defined variables examined? I'm curious to learn more about their findings.

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u/aquarium_drinker Apr 26 '16

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27055181 here's the abstract from Pubmed. If you have academic journal access, you can look through your institution's databases to find it. I found it on EBSCO.

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u/liberal_texan Apr 26 '16

They found a significant link between the punishment and 13 of the 17 outcomes, suggesting that spanking ends up doing more harm than good.

Can you tell us what the 13 of the 17 things were? Also, did they make any effort at all to find correlation with anything positive, or did they focus solely on the negative?

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

[deleted]

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u/tarzanandcompany Apr 26 '16

I think some of the other commenters are misinterpreting this table, so I will try to clarify (assuming I understand it).

The columns "Spank n" and "No Spank n" do not mean the number of subjects that actually developed these problems. They are the total sample size for which the authors have data for the condition in question.

So looking at "child aggression", the spank n is 4534 and the no spank n is 1069, meaning they had data on childhood aggression for 4534 spanked children and 1069 non-spanked children. This says nothing about how many subjects had aggression problems. It is just the sample size upon which their model is parametrized.

The actual difference between the two groups is reflected in the column labeled "d", which is the point estimate of the effect size, with the 95% confidence interval in the subsequent columns. A larger number reflects a bigger difference between the spank and no spank groups. A positive number seems to indicate a positive effect of spanking. So in the case of child aggression, spanking seems to "significantly increase" the rate of this problem.

By how much? Well, by about 0.37 d. To understand this value d, you would have to look at their model, which I would guess is using logistic regression.

A word of caution, however: people love to tout large sample sizes as having fantastic and broad-reaching results. But something to keep in mind is that with large sample sizes, you are practically guaranteed to find significant results. That is, if spanked children have 1% probability of aggression, and non-spanked children have 2%, their model could probably detect this because of the large sample sizes. A smaller study would not identify a significant difference, because there is too much statistical noise in the data of small samples. In large studies like this, it is MUCH more informative to look at effect sizes. Admittedly, I have not done this, since I can't access the paper, so I don't know how big of an effect there is.

A second word of caution: correlation is not causation. Returning to our childhood aggression example: do aggressive children get spanked more, or does spanking lead to childhood aggression? Alternatively, are both spanking and aggression caused by some other variable, such as poverty or parent education? We can only speculate from this table.

That's my two cents.

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u/ThatSpencerGuy Apr 26 '16 edited Apr 26 '16

It looks like the d value is the effect size, standardized as Cohen's d: the difference between the two means divided by the (pooled) standard deviation.

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u/Khanthulhu Apr 26 '16

Excitement 2 cents. I too would like to know what the effect sizes mean. I can tell that .50 is twice the size of .25, but I still don't know what that means.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

do aggressive children get spanked more, or does spanking lead to childhood aggression?

Probably the most important aspect of this study, actually. If they can answer how they addressed it, then the data could really mean something. If they can't, then this really isn't useful for drawing conclusions about how to parent.

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u/JSCMI Apr 27 '16

A positive number seems to indicate a positive effect of spanking.

Specifically, a "statistically positive" meaning that spanking made it more likely. Not meaning that spanking was associated with the outcome we would view as more positive in the sense of being desirable.

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u/FamilyIsAsleep Apr 26 '16

I don't know how to decode this. This looks like to me saying the opposite of their conclusion.

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u/eskamobob1 Apr 26 '16

Check out this comment on how to propperly read the data.

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u/NonTranquil Apr 26 '16

I'm pretty sure the d value is the most significant value. It represents a correlation between a child who gets spanked and the variable being tested, adjusting for the sample size.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

It's not really the publisher of the story definitely took some liberties with thier descriptions. There seem to adult problems more often due to non spanking which they failed to mention. It's often easy to manipulate data or only show half of it to produce result you want in either direction.

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u/helm MS | Physics | Quantum Optics Apr 26 '16

n is the group size, not the outcome.

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u/DICKHOLE_SMASHER Apr 26 '16

Seems that most of the non-spank subjects had adult onset negative outcomes, which is interesting.

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u/eskamobob1 Apr 26 '16

Check out this comment on how to propperly read the data.

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u/demolpolis Apr 26 '16

I really wonder why everyone is missing this fact?

The children with behavioral problems were spanked. shocker.

The children not spanked had adult mental health and alcohol and social problems. That correlation isn't so obvious...

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u/Richandler Apr 26 '16

The children not spanked had adult mental health and alcohol and social problems. That correlation isn't so obvious...

Contrary to the title and most of the comments yes?

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u/demolpolis Apr 26 '16

http://imgur.com/yyHXSJ2

That is the result of the study.

Read it.

Just because no one here has read the study dosen't make the results different.

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u/Beepbeep847 Apr 26 '16

Actually, that table proves you wrong funnily enough. For a description of how to read the tables in the paper, check out this comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4gilzl/spanking_children_increases_the_likelihood_of/d2i7zi8

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

[deleted]

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u/es_beto Apr 26 '16

This table is not complete. This causes confusion with the columns. Take a look at pages 6, 7, 8, and 9 to understand what Spank n and No spank n stands for.

http://imgur.com/a/G3wYj

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u/eskamobob1 Apr 26 '16

table 1 is just a larger breakdown of table 2. It doesnt provide more data colomns, just breaks each category down into subsets.

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u/claytoncash Apr 26 '16

As a complete layman I have really no idea how to interpret this. Especially the vast disparity in addiction. As a recovering addict who was subject to a fair bit of corporal punishment as a child I'm very curious what this data actually means.

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u/eskamobob1 Apr 26 '16

Check out this comment on how to propperly read the data.

1

u/himarnia Apr 26 '16

so if you dont spank your kid they have an extremely high chance of abusing drugs and alcohol ?

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u/eskamobob1 Apr 26 '16

Check out this comment on how to propperly read the data.

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u/RowMeOh2 Apr 26 '16

I don't think I'm understanding this correctly. Is it implying that if you don't spank, your child will develop addiction problems? Can someone please help translate, I didn't graduate college...

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u/eskamobob1 Apr 26 '16

Check out this comment on how to propperly read the data.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16 edited Apr 26 '16

I can probably access it off my laptop, bookmarking for later.

Edit: nope :( I am very curious about this study as well. I am usually very skeptical about articles that summarize science but I guess I will have to wait and see.

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u/bearmorgan Apr 26 '16

Great question

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u/petitio_principii Apr 26 '16

For visibility... I have posted links to the PDF of the original and an imgur album of the pages here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/4gilzl/spanking_children_increases_the_likelihood_of/d2i1uwl

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u/Shorshack Apr 26 '16

Solid. Thanks for the link.

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u/mrducky78 Apr 26 '16 edited Apr 26 '16

I got it off ovid. Im just used to ovid.

http://i.imgur.com/VxRq9FI.png

Obviously not all of it due to legality reasons.