Construct validity of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory: A meta-analytic review

The Child Abuse Potential (CAP) Inventory is a commonly used tool for assessing child physical abuse (CPA) risk. Although there are qualitative summaries of the CAP Inventory construct validity, to date there have not been any comprehensive quantitative summaries of the CAP Inventory construct validity. The present study was conducted to provide a meta-analytic review of studies examining the construct validity (i.e., nomological convergent validity) of the CAP Inventory abuse scale.

Literature searches yielded 1437 unduplicated studies for review. After screening, 121 studies met the inclusion criteria, from which 543 effect sizes (ESs) that reported associations between CPA risk factors and the CAP Inventory abuse scores were identified.

The 543 ESs were placed into 38 theory-based CPA risk factor domains taken from a previous meta-analysis of CPA risk factors in studies of substantiated CPA. Twenty-one of the 25 risk factors previously reported as significant in a CPA meta-analysis were also significant in the current meta-analysis. Inspection of the mean ESs (rs) across risk domains revealed a significantly (p = .0003) larger mean ES of 0.401 in the current study compared to a mean ES of 0.337 in the previous study of CPA risk factors. Overall, 28 of the 38 previously studied theory-based CPA risk factors were significantly (p < .05) related to CAP Inventory abuse scores.

The current meta-analysis indicates that elevated CAP Inventory abuse scores are associated with an array of theory-based personal and interpersonal caretaker risk factors that reflect characteristics of known child physical abusers.