Volume 19, No. 2, 2022
Child Abuse Scale-Revised: Modification, Revision and Cultural Validation of Child Abuse Scale
Prof. Dr. Farah Malik , Saima Saeed
Abstract
Children become victims of atrocities in different cultures which affects their mental and physical health. Child Abuse Scale (CAS; Malik & Shah, 2007) was devised to measure child abuse inflicted by parents for 8-12 years old children. Based on the researcher’s experience, children got confused in responding to the same scale for both mother and father at a time. Moreover, sexual abuse-related items couldn’t be retained originally. The present study was carried out to modify, standardize and develop norms for the CAS for the Pakistani population. Participants of the study included 700 children of 8-12 years (both boys & girls) drawn from mainstream schools (non-clinical sample; n = 600) and the child protection and welfare bureau (clinical sample; n = 100). Participants, after taking formal permission from authorities, were administered with CAS-R and a detailed demographic information sheet. To ensure construct validity, Principle component factor analysis was run which bare three factors for CAS-R, labeled as Physical & Emotional Abuse, Physical &Emotional Neglect, and Sexual Abuse. Both mother and father forms revealed high reliability for overall and subscale scores. Item analysis revealed good internal validity. The CAS-R is a psychometrically sound measure for the assessment of abuse inflicted by parents.
Pages: 2716-2730
Keywords: Child Abuse Scale, physical & emotional abuse, neglect, Sexual Abuse