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Article Summary

Berent, R., Crusto, C., Lotyczewski, B., Greenberg, S., Hightower, A., and Kaufman, J. Winter 2008.
Development and psychometric refinement of a measure assessing young children's exposure to violence: Parent report of children's experiences. Best Practices in Mental Health 4(1):19–30. http://lyceumbooks.com/MentalHJournal.htm.

The authors outline a new method for identifying children exposed to violence. Known as the Parent Report of Children’s Experiences (PRCE), it is derived from an earlier testing tool called the Parent Appraisal of Children’s Experiences (PACE). PACE was intended to give school personnel information about incoming kindergarteners, such as child health, motor skills, education, behavior, and other factors. PRCE was made by editing and clarifying violence-related questions found in PACE. In all, 215 families were referred to the PRCE program. They spent 14 to 250 days in the program, with a median of 88.6 days. The children involved ranged from infants to 6 years, with a median of 3 years old. Fifty-eight percent were male. As for the caregivers, 57 percent identified themselves as black or Hispanic, 9 percent as white, and 4 percent as other, with no information gathered on the remaining 29 percent. Data collection took place from August 2003 through June 2006. The alpha for the PCRE as a whole is 0.82. Additional alphas were 0.79 for the symptoms scale, 0.70 for the environmental exposure scale, and 0.76 for the media exposure scale. Within the article there was a table showing descriptive statistics of the PRCE study. On the table Items 1–5 were scored on a four-point scale with 1 = no exposure and 4 = high exposure. Additionally, items 6–14 were scored on a scale with 1 = never, 2 = rarely, 3 = sometimes, and 4 = always. The two items with the highest means scores were moodiness and difficulty behaving; and the item that had the lowest mean was exposure to video game violence. The study shows that the PRCE is in fact a valid tool for indentifying children who have been exposed to violence. In addition, the PRCE data suggest that violence witnessed in the media is not as strongly linked to symptoms as real environmental exposure. The data suggest the need for additional testing and refinement of the PRCE tool.