An attributional analysis of child abuse among low-income African Americanmothers

Attribution theory predicts that when someone is perceived as responsible f or a negative event, this inference elicits feelings of anger and anger evo kes aggressive responding. In contrast, perceived nonresponsibility should be linked to feelings of sympathy and less aggression. These thinking-feeli ng-action linkages were applied to the domain of child maltreatment in the present study. In individual interviews samples of abusive, at-risk, and no nabusive African American mothers were presented with videotaped scenarios depicting a target chi Id engaged in misbehavior. Mothers rated the severit y of the behavior, how responsible they perceived the child to be, their fe elings of sympathy and anger, and how much punishment they would endorse, c oded as mild to harsh. They also completed a measure of parental stress. Co mpared with nonabusive mothers, abusive mothers reported more stress, perce ived the behavior as more negative, inferred the child to be more responsib le, reported more anger, and endorsed harsher punishment. The attributional data of at-risk mothers consistently fell between that of the other two gr oups. Regression and path analyses documented a systematic pattern of think ing-feeling-action linkages in accord with attributional predictions. The u sefulness of an attributional approach to child maltreatment and the implic ations of the findings as a model for intervention were discussed.