Journal Entry 5 (Psychological Maltreatment)

    The article I've read is titled "Child Maltreatment, Child Protection, and Mental Health". The article is a very broad description of psychological maltreatment on children, the research that has been done, and what the results of that research have shown. Like previous articles, this one states that very little has been done in the psychological maltreatment field, but it gives even more reasons why that might be the case.

     A very large reason why little research has been done is that psychological maltreatment is a fairly new field of research for psychologists, only dating back to 1988. With such little time and knowledge of psychological maltreatment, the research that is done is relatively basic and inconclusive without using some form of correlation or association. With such basic research, there are many instances of measurement error. The article explains that "The majority of studies of the long-term psychopathological consequences of childhood experiences have used case–control design, in which data on experiences were obtained through interviews in adult life that rely on retrospective recall. Hardt and Rutter reviewed the empirical research findings on the validity of retrospective recall for childhood maltreatment and chronic family conflict. They found that retrospective reports in adulthood of major adverse experiences in childhood involve a substantial rate of false negatives and measurement error." (Byrne) This means that the research that psychologists did was heavily relied on human memory and honesty, two characteristics of humans that are very faulty. Memory cannot be trusted, as often times humans will delude what actually happened with what they want to happen. Honesty is just as much a key issue, because it is well known that people lie all the time, sometimes even for no reason.This is a concern for me and my belief that psychological maltreatment is the most dangerous form of child abuse, because if people are lying about experiencing it, then there is no way for psychologists to understand the relationship between psychological maltreatment in children and how they develop into adulthood.

    After reading five articles and having a much better understanding about what psychological maltreatment is and the pros and cons of it's research, I believe that reading an entire book over the subject can do nothing but help polish my ideas into a well thought out argument. Supporting details and evidence of both sides are needed for me to write the best paper possible, and reading a book is much more informative of both of these than articles, so I expect to have a good grasp of what I am going to write about after reading.