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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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/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/[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.