About This Project

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

While it is important for researchers to be able to study situations that may contribute to aggressive parenting behaviors, it is unethical to allow actual aggressive parenting behaviors as part of a study. For this reason researchers often use tasks that are designed to measure supposedly aggressive behaviors without allowing participants to actually harm a child. Recently, social scientists have been using a measure called the "Voodoo Doll Task" as a proxy for aggressive behaviors. However, to date, no research has examined whether the Voodoo Doll Task is appropriate for use in child physical abuse research. Thus, the proposed study will gather data on whether the Voodoo Doll Task is a valid proxy for aggressive parenting behaviors.

To date, I have collected data in a series of studies that associate a risk factor for child physical abuse to parents' performance on the Voodoo Doll Task. For example, parents' with high trait aggression and high state hostility are especially likely to use pins to "harm" their child. However, in order for researchers to have more confidence in this task I want to associate actual parenting behavior (such as yelling, hitting, etc.) with their performance on the Voodoo Doll Task. This is the aim of the current research project.

What is the significance of this project?

Child physical abuse researchers need a valid proxy for aggressive parenting behaviors to conduct well-controlled, lab-based research. This will help to identify the contributors to aggressive parenting behaviors and lead to the development of efficacious and theory-driven child physical abuse interventions.

What are the goals of the project?

What is the Voodoo Doll Task? It is a brief task that shows parents an outline of a person. Parents are instructed to imagine the outline of a person represents their child and that they can "harm" the child by selecting to stick pins into the child. The outcome variable is the number of pins the parent selects to stick into the child with more pins indicating more aggressive intent.

For the current study I want to associate actual aggressive parenting behaviors with performance on the Voodoo Doll Task. For this, I will associate parents' responses to the Parent-Child version of the Conflict Tactics Scale (this task asks parents to report different parenting behaviors, some of which are aggressive in nature) with their performance on the Voodoo Doll Task. All data collection will be accomplished using Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk website.

The validation of the Voodoo Doll Task for use in child physical abuse research has the potential to greatly contribute to understanding the situations that contribute to aggressive parenting behaviors. For example, people may believe that parents may be more aggressive when they are sleep-deprived or if they are multi-tasking. Despite these ideas making intuitive sense, these are difficult to test in large part because researchers cannot allow parents to harm a child as part of a research project. However, these future studies are possible if tasks--such as the Voodoo Doll Task--can be developed that ethically measure parental aggression.

I am excited about the contributions that the Voodoo Doll Task can make towards understanding child physical abuse. I know many other researchers in this area who would similarly be excited to have this tool in their repertoire. A complete understanding of who physically abuses a child and what situations contribute to child physical abuse will improve individual lives and society. This proposed study is a small but important piece to that goal.