| dc.description.abstract | Child physical abuse is a serious social problem associated with a host of risk factors and consequences, ranging from unemployment and poverty to substance use and criminality. Despite years of research on the etiology of child physical abuse, child physical abuse remains a persistent concern for our society. Exploring the relationship between poverty and child physical abuse is an underutilized approach for understanding and responding to child physical abuse. At present, much of the literature emphasizes the connection between maltreatment and income-based poverty. Using the family stress model, this dissertation research explores the impact of economic conditions (income and material hardship) on risk for child physical abuse, and the process by which these economic conditions contribute to an environment where child physical abuse occurs. With a sample of 4,845 mothers from the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study (FFCWS), a full panel model of mediation was conducted over three waves of data to investigate the invariance of the proposed model (economic state, housing hardship, bill-paying hardship, health hardship, food hardship, depression, parenting stress, domestic violence, risk for child physical abuse); the effect of the mediators (parenting stress, depression and domestic violence) on the relationship between economic conditions and risk for child physical abuse; and the strongest economic predictors of risk for child physical abuse. Although the results indicate a good fit of the measurement and structural models to the data, the indirect and direct effects are negligible and non-significant, indicating no evidence of partial or full mediation (p<.005). Using p<.05, only one indirect pathway was significant: Maternal depression (year 5) significantly mediated the relationship between food hardship (year 3) and risk for child physical abuse (year 9) (β=.007, p<.05). Although the effect sizes were small, there were significant direct effects between bill-paying hardship and maternal parenting stress and domestic violence, food hardship and maternal depression, and economic state and parenting stress (p<.05). These results support the use of an inclusive model to explore the relationship between economic conditions and risk for child physical abuse, suggest directions for future research, and highlight the importance of emphasizing the roles of economic conditions and child maltreatment in policies and practices that affect families. | |
