The development and piloting of the ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tool—Parent version (ICAST-P)

doi:10.1016/j.chiabu.2009.09.006

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 33, Issue 11, November 2009, Pages 826-832

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2009.09.006 Get rights and content

Abstract

Objective

Child maltreatment is a problem that has longer recognition in the northern hemisphere and in high-income countries. Recent work has highlighted the nearly universal nature of the problem in other countries but demonstrated the lack of comparability of studies because of the variations in definitions and measures used. The International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect has developed instrumentation that may be used with cross-cultural and cross-national benchmarking by local investigators.

Design and sampling

The instrument design began with a team of expert in Brisbane in 2004. A large bank of questions were subjected to two rounds of Delphi review to develop the fielded version of the instrument. Convenience samples included approximately 120 parent respondents with children under the age of 18 in each of six countries (697 total).

Results

This paper presents an instrument that measures parental behaviors directed at children and reports data from pilot work in 6 countries and 7 languages. Patterns of response revealed few missing values and distributions of responses that generally were similar in the six countries. Subscales performed well in terms of internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha in very good range (0.77–0.88) with the exception of the neglect and sex abuse subscales. Results varied by child age and gender in expected directions but with large variations among the samples. About 15% of children were shaken, 24% hit on the buttocks with an object, and 37% were spanked. Reports of choking and smothering were made by 2% of parents.

Conclusion

These pilot data demonstrate that the instrument is well tolerated and captures variations in, and potentially harmful forms of child discipline.

Practice implications

The ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tool – Parent Version (ICAST-P) has been developed as a survey instrument to be administered to parents for the assessment of child maltreatment in a multi-national and multi-cultural context. It was developed with broad input from international experts and subjected to Dephi review, translation, and pilot testing in six countries. The results of the Delphi study and pilot testing are presented. This study demonstrates that a single instrument can be used in a broad range of cultures and languages with low rates of missing data and moderate to high internal consistency.

Section snippets

Methods

The Brisbane workshop attendees developing the parent instrument explicitly agreed not to develop new definitions of abuse or neglect that would be applied in all countries. These experts recognized that differences in language, culture, and history might alter the perspective in different parts of the globe about which parental acts might be regarded as abusive or neglectful. Instead, the attendees chose to focus on asking about the frequencies of parent behaviors; in this they modeled their

Discussion

We report here the development of a parent instrument asking about child discipline that has been piloted successfully in 6 countries. The instrument had benefited from input by experts from 40 countries. The behaviors it taps are not the entire range of disciplinary behaviors but behaviors thought to be common or important by the contributing experts. The parent instrument appeared to all survey coordinators not to elicit distress from the participating parents and less than 2% of responses to

Acknowledgements

In addition to the authors above who led the pilot efforts described in this paper, the following names are colleagues who helped develop the ICAST instrument used with this study:

•
Arlen, Eva Affiliation, SCF-Sweden Country, Sweden
•
Azevedo, Maria Amélia Affiliation, University of São Paulo Country, Brazil
•
Balagopal, Gopalan Affiliation, UNICEF Country, USA
•
Bequele, Assefa Affiliation, The African Child Policy Forum Country, Ethiopia
•
Bonner, Barbara Affiliation, OHSC-Center on Child Abuse and Neglect

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^☆: This work has been conducted with the instrumental and monetary support of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect.

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The development and piloting of the ISPCAN Child Abuse Screening Tool—Parent version (ICAST-P)☆

Abstract

Objective

Design and sampling

Results

Conclusion

Practice implications

Section snippets

Methods

Discussion

Acknowledgements

Child Abuse & Neglect

Child Abuse & Neglect

Child Abuse & Neglect

Development of a questionnaire to collect public health data for school entrants in London: Child Health Assessment at School Entry (CHASE) project

Child Care, Health and Development

Exploring consensus in practice with youth who are sexually abused: findings from a Delphi study of practitioner views in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland

Child Maltreatment

World perspectives on child abuse