The Comprehensive Childhood Maltreatment Inventory: early development and reliability analyses

Our goal was to develop a reliable measure of childhood maltreatment that could be used to evaluate retrospective memories among adults across a broad range of potentially abusive caregiver behaviors.

These behaviors were organized into 31 items that query age at onset, frequency across 4 developmental periods, relationship of the perpetrator(s), and respondents' perception of the experience. Additional factors directly relevant to each of the individual 4 categories of childhood maltreatment were also queried.

Preliminary data collected from 95 college students, find the measure to have excellent test-retest reliability, and 2 of 4 subscales to possess adequate internal consistency.

Reasons for low internal consistency for the Physical Maltreatment and Physical Neglect categories and the relative importance of test-retest reliability as compared to internal consistency in a questionnaire of this type are discussed.