The Research Of The Relationship Between The Parents Corporal Punishment Experience, Corporal Punishiment Attitude And The Mental Health Of The Vocational College Students

Corporal Punishment (CP) refers to parental discipline that is used inorder to help prevent children from repeating certain unwanted behavior,correct this behavior, and to teach the child the right direction into adulthood.CP is used to deliberately cause children physical pain, while not causing anyreal and permanent physical damage, as this discipline is done in love forthe child. Therefore, parental use of CP can stop children from doingincorrect behavior, and make them immediately obey, obtaining animmediate educational effect. To this end, in most countries, using CP in thefamily to help teach children is very common.According to the Brofenbrenner ecological system theory, theoccurrence, use and outcome of CP by parents will be affected by many otherfactors as part of their ecological background. In the past, there has been agreat deal of research in western countries on how CP effects a child’scharacter, however, there has not been enough CP research established inChina.In the meantime, there has been much research that shows that theparental use of CP can cause a series of negative effects for each individual’sdevelopment. However, most of this research is only focused on the shortperiod that children or teenagers are cognitive, which only shows theshort-term effects on a child’s emotional and behavioral development withthe use of CP during that time. And, there has been only a few studies with the focus on the long-term use of CP on college students’ mental health, oreven the long-term impact on adults.In addition, the previous research was only focused on the use of CP onmental health, but there has been a lack of research done on the ‘relationship’between CP and a child’s mental health. Lastly, the previous CP research wasless focused on vocational college students. As more and more children growup into this vocational college students group, it is very necessary to focusand carry out research on this group.Therefore, this thesis is based on the common characteristics of therelationship between vocational college students and the mental healthinfluence in the use of CP in their lives. We further discuss the use of CP inthe college students’ life could cause the mental health partly throughinfluencing college student’s attitude toward the use of CP.The study employs a method of Cluster Sampling, by using which410students from a Xuzhou vocational college of Jiangsu Province are selectedto take part in the study with401valid questionnaires recovered. Based onthe questionnaire of corporal punishment in childhood by college studentsrevised by Wang Meifang(2009), questionnaire of corporal punishmentattitude revised by Chang, etc (ATPP) and The Symptom Checklist90(SCL-90), the questionnaire of this study is designed mainly to measure therelationship among corporal punishment experience, attitude towardscorporal punishment and mental health as well as the intermediary effect ofsuch attitude towards physical punishment on the mental health.The conclusion of this research is drawn as follows:1About69.6%of all vocational college students have reported theirsuffering from parental corporal punishment during childhood, with annualaverage number of corporal punishments up to16.23times. Among all corporal punishments, light physical punishment counts for16.7%, while2.7%of all students studied suffered only from severe physicalpunishment.49.6%of all students were subject to both light and severephysical punishments. The vocational college students who were end up withsevere physical punishments consisted of52.9%.2The number of severe physical punishment is remarkably less than thatof light physical punishments, which are widely used by parents. Malestudents rather than female students have suffered great more physicalpunishments concerning universality, frequency and severity. Gender ofparents is also a key to physical punishment, which shows that students ofvocational college were easily punished by their father instead of their mother.However, it was their mother that would punish them more frequently andseverely. So far there has been no hard evidence that parental punishment isrelated to urban-rural difference.3It is predictable what their psychological health as adults would besimply by studying their experience during childhood whether they werepunished by their parents and how severe their punishments were.4It works as a key factor of the attitude towards physical punishmentamong vocational students whether they were punished and the severity ofpunishment during childhood. Students who experienced severe punishmentsduring childhood are more in support of physical punishment as a major wayof students’ management.5The attitude toward parental punishment plays an intermediary partbetween childhood experience of punishment and mental health at present.