We introduce the construct of perceived containment, defined as children's beliefs about adults' capacity to impose firm limits and to prevail if there is a conflict in goals. We propose that children's containment beliefs represent an important but understudied factor in the development and maintenance of childhood aggression. Children's ratings on the Perceived Containment Questionnaire (PCQ) were inversely related to parent and teacher ratings of externalizing problems. Moreover, this relation was found to be independent of the quality of parental discipline. We also found evidence that perceived containment moderated the relation between overly harsh, inept discipline and children's externalizing behaviors: ineffective discipline was directly related to externalizing problems in children with relatively high PCQ scores but was unrelated to externalizing problems in children with relatively low PCQ scores. For the latter group of children, the affective quality of the mother–child relationship was a better predictor of problem behavior. These findings provide additional support for Kochanska's (1993) model of differential socialization and for Frick's (1998) assertions concerning meaningful subgroups of aggressive children.
Researchers often argue that the structural models of the constructs they study are relevant to clinicians. Unfortunately, few clinicians are able to translate the mathematically precise relationships between latent constructs and observed scores into information that can be usefully applied to individuals. Typically this means that when a new structural model supplants a rival model, clinicians have only vague (and often incorrect) notions about how score interpretations should change. Fortunately, it is possible to estimate latent scores from observed scores in a rigorous manner. More important, paying attention to the confidence intervals around those estimates can assist clinicians' intuitions about what can (and cannot) be known with precision about a person's abilities. These methods are illustrated with structural models of the WISC-IV
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