The parental daily diary. A sensitive measure of the process of change in a child maltreatment prevention program

There is a substantial deficit of sensitive measures of parental discipline in the area of prevention, generally, and in child maltreatment prevention specifically, despite reports that over a million children experience maltreatment in the United States every year. Part of the challenge in locating such measures is the impossibility of obtaining accurate observational measures of the degree of harsh discipline, unless extremely large populations are used. The majority of studies on harsh discipline have dealt with this problem by using self-report instruments or proxy observation tasks (such as observing mother-child interactions in a compliance framework). The most well-known self-report instruments, such as the Child Abuse Potential Inventory (Milner, 1986), are constructed to measure parental pathology in maltreating parents rather than to identify parents who might benefit from preventive endeavors. In contrast, there are no well standardized measures of mother-child interaction that document a sensitivity to the presence of harsh discipline, possibly due to the clear pressure of social desirability problems. This paper outlines a daily self-observation measure of parental disciplinary behavior in the form of a diary. This self-monitoring instrument offered data on the overall feelings and disciplinary behaviors used daily following each session on parenting group interventions. The study showed a gradual decrease in physical punishment and a gradual increase in planned ignoring across treatment, as these were introduced as part of an ongoing curriculum. The use of an explicit technique, such as time-out, increased abruptly rather than gradually and effects were seen only after specific instruction. Advantages and future applications of this kind of ongoing self-observation measure of treatment progress are described.