Ohio School Nurses Define Emotional Maltreatment of School-Age Children.

Of the 2.5 million reported cases of child abuse and neglect reported in 1990, 9 percent involved emotional abuse. However, unclear guidelines on what constitutes emotional abuse make it difficult for school nurses to intervene over suspected abuse. This paper describes the development of an instrument that defines emotional maltreatment in operational terms and that can be used by school nurses. Members (N=174) of a state nurse's association were surveyed in order to describe their opinions on referral of school-age children to social service agencies for emotional maltreatment. An adaptation of an instrument of 16 parental behavior clusters that operationally defines emotional maltreatment was used. The questionnaire adapted for this research asked if school nurses "would" or"would not" refer parents or guardians to local social service agencies for the 16 emotional maltreatment examples described in the survey. The nurses' personal characteristics were then correlated with the questionnaire. The percentage of nurses that "would refer" the parental examples ranged from 51 percent to 99 percent. Three of the 16 examples were rated referable by 99 percent of the nurses. A school nurse's experience had no apparent influence on how the nurse answered and a child's race or gender did not affect referral rate. Included in appendixes are a sample questionnaire and Operational Definitions of Emotional Maltreatment of School-Age Children. Contains 37 references. (RJM)