US Pediatricians' Attitudes, Beliefs, and Perceived Injunctive Norms About Spanking.
Catherine A Taylor, Julia M Fleckman, Seth J Scholer and 1 others
PMID 29894363WHAT IT FOUND
Most responding US pediatricians said spanking is bad and harmful, but they thought colleagues were slightly more approving.
They expected more child harms than benefits from spanking.
Key findings
01Most responding pediatricians had negative attitudes toward spanking: 78.8% agreed it is a bad disciplinary technique overall and 71.9% agreed it is harmful for children.
02Respondents thought average colleagues were slightly more approving than themselves, with the largest reported gap of 13.2% for the belief that sometimes spanking is the only way to get a child to behave.
03Pediatricians expected more negative than positive outcomes from spanking: 86.7% believed it sometimes, most of the time, or always leads to a child being more aggressive, while 51.7% believed it sometimes leads to better short-term behavior.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
Only 787 of 1500 randomly selected pediatricians completed the survey, a 53% response rate, so nonrespondents may differ from respondents. The sample over-represented pediatricians from the West and smaller practices and under-represented those from the South and larger practices, so it may not reflect all US pediatricians. The survey used a shortened attitude scale and a newly developed colleague norm measure, and different measures were used in older surveys, so comparisons over time are uncertain.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflict of interest. The supplied publication types indicate NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use this paper as evidence about how spanking affects children. It reports what pediatricians believed and expected, not measured child outcomes.