Most parents use some type of coercion with their children, and they all differ in terms of how they implement these strategies. (Trickett & Susman, 1988). How parents evaluate the behavior of their children can be influenced by their expectations (Tedeschi & Felson, 1994). We employed several of the classic measures of hostility (Buss & Durkee, 1957) in order to try to predict scores on the Attitudes Toward Spanking Scale (Gagne, Tourigny, Joly, Pouliot-Lapointe, 2007). In this way, we wanted to investigate whether someone's propensity for violence in general would lead to a greater acceptance of corporal punishment toward children.
Method.
A total of 19 students from a Social Psychology course (5 males, 13 females, 1 did not response) chose to participate in this research project. For their participation they received minimal extra credit in the class. The ethnic background was quite diverse with 9 claiming to be Hispanic or Latino, 3 Anglo/Caucasian, 3 claiming Mixed, 2 Asian-American, and 1 African-American. The average age was 25.6 (SD = 9.6) years and all years were represented, the largest being sophomores (n = 9).
Participants completed three subscales from Buss & Durkee's (1957) Hostility-Guilt Inventory. These were the Assault subscale (10 items), the Verbal subscale (13 items), and a slight variation of the Indirect subscale (8 items). These are all answered True or False, with each answer being scored as either 1 or 0, depending on the wording of the item. High scores indicate higher levels of aggression or hostility.
The participants also completed the four-item Attitudes Toward Spanking Scale (Gagne et al., 2007). Each of these items (e.g., "There should be a law forbidding parents to slap their children") is scored on a 5-point scale ranging from "Strongly Disagree" (1) to Strongly Agree (5) with a Neutral or mid-point (3). .
Results.
The 4-item Attitudes Toward Spanking Scale behaved in psycho-metrically sound ways.