Identification of culturally relevant concept of child abuse in Mexican children who attend to a tertiary pediatric hospital

Introduction: Child Abuse (CA) is a global public health problem. Currently there is not screening tools in Mexican children to identify it. The aim of this study was to identify the culturally relevant concept that school... [ view full abstract ]

Introduction: Child Abuse (CA) is a global public health problem. Currently there is not screening tools in Mexican children to identify it. The aim of this study was to identify the culturally relevant concept that school children associated with CA, in order to obtain content for the construction of a screening tool.
Material and Methods: Cross-sectional descriptive study. It was held at the National Institute of Pediatrics (INP) from February 2015 to May 2016. It was approved by the INP´s Research and Ethics Committees. 473 Mexican children were included from 9 to 12 years, who attended the outpatient clinic. It was applied a questionnaire with six sentences (stimulus) and a distractor for collecting the variables of interest: definers (words produced), and other for sociodemographic variables. A descriptive analysis was performed and an analysys of the semantic networks (size and core network and semantic distance). Differences by age and age group were sought by chi square test and Spearman correlations by differences were identified.
Results. Children showed an extensive knowledge of child abuse, the definers were grouped into eleven categories, six were principal categories: physical, psychological, sexual abuse, neglect, labor exploitation and witnesses of violence. Girls and boys in different age groups identified all categories (Pearson chi square = 17.27, p = 0.303). There were significant differences in the ranking of the defining age and sex within each identified category.
Conclusions. We identify eleven dimensions (categories) in the concept of MI who issued the children to form the screening tool. The defining will be considered by sex and age to form the items of the proposal, due to the differences found.