Bureau of Research, New Jersey Division of Youth and Family ServicesIncreasingly, professional and public media are promulgating the belief that the problems of child abuse and neglect are broadly distributed throughout society, suggesting that their frequency and severity are unrelated to socioeconomic class. This paper argues that this belief is not supported by the evidence, and that its perpetuation serves to divert attention from the nature of the problems.Child abuse is not a black problem, a brown problem, or a white problem. Child abusers are found in the ranks of the unemployed, the blue-collar worker, the white-collar worker and the professional. They are Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Baptist and atheist.' . . . [Clhild abuse and neglect occur among families from all socioeconomic levels, religious groups, races and nationalities.16The problem of child abuse is not limited to any particular economic, social, or intellectual level, race or religion.6 . . . [Clhild abuse and child neglect afflict all communities, regardless of race, religion or economic status.* hile such oft-repeated statements w are true, they are only half-true.Child abuse and neglect have indeed been found among all socioeconomic classes, and within all of the othcr groupings mentioned. But these statements seem to imply that child abuse and neglect occur without regard to socioeconomic class, or are distributed proportionately among the total population. The impression that these problems are democratically distributed throughout society is increasingly being conveyed by professionals writing in academic journals, and to the public through the news media, despite clear evidence to the contrary. This paper will be concerned primarily with three issues: 1) the extent and nature of the evidence associating child abuse and neglect with social class;
Studies which have used various measures of meaningfulness to measure semantic satiation, and in other ways have attempted to test the effects of semantic satiation, are critically evaluated. It is concluded that the effects of the phenomenon labeled as semantic satiation have not been reliably measured and are in doubt. An attempt is made to link semantic satiation to what has been called the verbal transformation effect, and an alternative approach to the study of semantic satiation is suggested.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.