Effects of violence and maltreatment on the development and well-being of children: Experimental approaches to studying the causal effects of maltreatment reduction (The EVIDENCE – Studies)

虐待儿童会给受影响的儿童造成直接的、往往是持久的身心痛苦。它与一系列负面的短期和长期结果有关，包括心理困难和学习成绩差。这些关系通常被解释为本质上是因果关系，虐待被认为会导致消极的发展轨迹。然而，大多数研究结果仅基于相关性分析，不允许这样的解释。因果关系只能通过实验研究来确定。然而，当涉及到儿童虐待的研究时，使用实验方法的研究很少。在德国，虐待是在“关起门来”的情况下发生的，因此很难在实地实验研究中调查其影响。然而，在撒哈拉以南非洲，在养育儿童过程中使用暴力的现象非常普遍，社会也很容易接受，这为在寻求减少虐待的干预措施的基础上进行实验性操作提供了绝佳的机会。尽管全球背景不同，但潜在的研究结果对德国也有重大意义，因为潜在的机制可能是相同的。在这个项目中，我的目标是通过在撒哈拉以南非洲教育机构的背景下测试减少虐待干预对一系列结果的影响来补充当前的研究。为了调查这些对儿童的影响，以下三个步骤是必要的：必须检验旨在减少虐待的干预措施的有效性。2. 必须对虐待的影响进行纵向研究，评估多个时间点的潜在结果，从而能够控制对后期结果的其他影响。3. 为了评估虐待与各种结果之间的因果关系，必须进行实验研究。拟议的研究旨在将这三个步骤结合起来：在实验领域研究中，拟议的项目将测试旨在减少虐待的干预措施的有效性，并调查（减少）虐待在教育环境、社会、文化和高风险孤儿群体中的一般儿童群体中的影响。此外，该项目将侧重于虐待对学龄前儿童的影响。除了确定干预措施的有效性外，拟议的研究还允许在社区样本和高风险样本中监测虐待对3至17岁儿童的时间影响。拟议的研究开辟了测试虐待与各种结果之间因果关系的可能性，从儿童的福祉到社会和认知功能。

Child maltreatment inflicts immediate and often lasting physical and psychological pain on affected children. It has been associated with a broad range of negative short- and long-term outcomes, including psychological difficulties and poor academic performance. These relationships are often interpreted as being causal in nature, with maltreatment assumed to cause negative developmental trajectories. However, most findings are based only on correlational analyses, which do not allow for such an interpretation. Causal relationships can only be determined by experimental studies. When it comes to the study of childhood maltreatment, though, the research using experimental methodologies are scarce. In Germany, maltreatment occurs behind “closed doors”, making it difficult to investigate its effects in experimental field studies. Yet, the high prevalence and social acceptance of the use of violence in child rearing in Sub-Saharan Africa provides an excellent opportunity for experimental manipulations on the basis of interventions seeking to reduce maltreatment. Despite the different global contexts, the potential findings are of significant relevance for Germany too, since the underlying mechanisms are potentially the same. In this project, I aim to complement current research by testing the effects of a maltreatment-reducing intervention on a spectrum of outcomes in the context of educational institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to investigate these effects on children, the following three steps are necessary: 1. The effectiveness of interventions seeking to reduce maltreatment must be tested. 2. Longitudinal studies on the effects of maltreatment that assess the potential outcomes at more than one time point and that are therefore able to control for other influences on the later outcome must be conducted. 3. Experimental studies must be conducted in order to evaluate the causal relationship between maltreatment and various outcomes. The proposed studies aim to combine these three steps: In experimental field studies, the proposed project will test the effectiveness of an intervention aiming for a reduction in maltreatment and investigate the effects of (reducing) maltreatment in the general population of children across educational settings, societies, cultures, and in a high-risk group of orphaned children. Moreover, the project will focus on the effects of maltreatment on pre-school children. In addition to determining the effectiveness of the intervention, the proposed studies allow for the monitoring of the temporal effects of maltreatment on children between the ages of 3 to 17 both in community samples and high-risk samples. The proposed studies open up the possibility of testing the causal relationship between maltreatment and various outcomes, ranging from children’s well-being to social and cognitive functioning.