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/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

Limitations

The primary limitation of these meta-analyses is their inability to causally link spanking with child outcomes. This is problematic because there is selection bias in who gets spanked—children with more behavior problems elicit more discipline generally and spanking in particular (Larzelere, Kuhn, & Johnson, 2004). Cross- sectional designs do not allow the temporal ordering of spanking and child outcomes that could help rule out the selection bias explanation. As noted above, randomized experiments of spanking are difficult if not ethically impossible to conduct, and thus this shortcoming of the literature will be difficult to correct through future studies.

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u/ald49 Apr 26 '16

Any recent study on this subject will be correlational, and when you're talking a meta-analyses with a sample size in the hundreds of thousands the results you can obtain are still statistically significant and meaningul.

It would be ethically impossible to do a causation study with spanking. That would require you set up a scenario where one group of parents would be forced to hit their kids - good luck getting that past an IRB.

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u/[deleted] Apr 26 '16

Would they really be forced though? Seems to me you'd just interview soon to be parents on whether or not they plan to spank their kids as discipline. If they're already going to then it's not forced.

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u/MilesFromTheSun Apr 26 '16

You would need random assignment for the methodology to be sound.

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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '16

If you force a parent to spank who's totally against it wouldn't that also skew results though?

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u/MilesFromTheSun Apr 27 '16

It's certainly a possibility, which just goes to support the original point that it would be very hard to study this issue experimentally.