A Short Form and Severity Level Types for the Parent-child Conflict Tactics Scales

Murray A. Straus and Marybeth J. Mattingly Family Research Laboratory University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824 USA [email protected] 603 862-2594 Abstract This article describes a short form of the Parent-Child Conflict Tactics Scales (CTSPC) to measure child maltreatment when testing time does not permit use of the full length instrument. The article also presents a method for classifying cases according to severity of maltreatment. This method avoids confounding of corporal punishment with physical abuse and reduces skewness and outlier problems in analyses of general population samples. The short form was created by selecting items with the highest correlation with each of the CTSPC scales. The results show that (1) the short form is highly correlated with the full length form, (2) elicits from 80 to 96% of the maltreatment disclosure elicited by the full instrument, (3) identifies similar patterns of severity, and (4) has almost the same pattern of correlations with demographic variables. However, the full instrument provides more complete data on frequency of occurrence. Nevertheless, the short form produces results that are sufficiently parallel to the results from the full CTSPC to make it appropriate to use when the full CTSPC cannot be used. Severity level scoring is recommended for most analyses of behavior in general population samples.