Should discipline hurt? Shifting American spanking beliefs and implications for school corporal punishment policies (original) (raw)

American opinion on spanking has shifted. Most Americans agreed with the necessity of sometimes spanking children, but proportions disagreeing increased 15 percentage point (94% overall) between 1986 (16%) and 2010 (31%). Growing proportions disagreed with spanking in each consecutive decade for all significant generational cohorts, with the greatest increase against spanking for Silent Generation. In a logistic regression model, Poverty Level became an insignificant predictor for agreement with spanking. Top predictors in the logistic regression model employed in the current study were South Central Region of United States (b = 0.835), African American Race (b = 0.795), Rural Residence Type (b = 0.565), Male Gender (b = 0.446), and High School Diploma or Less Educational Attainment Level (b = 0.422). Findings inform corporal punishment policies affecting thousands of students. (Contains 3 tables and 3 figures.) Retrieved from ERIC database (ED540897) at http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICW...