Abuse Attribution Inventory (Feiring, Taska, & Chen, 2002)
- Populations: Early and Middle Adolescents
- Age ranges: 8-15
- Languages: English
- Countries: United States
Items
Subscales
- Internal-Traits/Behaviors, 9 Items
- Internal-Appearance, 3 Items
- External-Perpetrator, 4 Items
- External-Mom, 2 Items
Example Items
- “This happened to me because I am a bad person”
- “This happened to me because of the way I was dressed”
- “This happened because the perpetrator has a problem”
Responses
Items Used a 3 point ordinal scale: very true, somewhat true, not true.
Scoring
Not reported
Citations
- Feiring, C., Taska, L., & Chen, K. (2002). Trying to understand why horrible things happen: Attribution, shame, and symptom development following sexual abuse. Child Maltreatment, 7(1), 25-39. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11838512/
Team comments
The Internal-Appearance subscale did not reach our threshold for adequacy in terms of Internal Consistency.
Scoring breakdown
Measure development
- Significant design input from young people
- Cognitive interviews with young people
- Expert input
Validity
- Green: Face validity
- Unknown: Convergent validity
- Red: Construct validity
Reliability
- Green: Internal consistency
- Unknown: Test-retest
Ease of use
- Unknown: Readability
Definitions
Face validity: How well a measure appears to represent the construct it is supposed to be measuring.
Convergent validity: How well a measure correlates with other hypothetically-related measures.
Construct validity: The extent to which a measure reflects the construct it was designed to evaluate.
Internal consistency: The extent to which items in a scale capture aspects of the same construct.
Test-retest: The degree to which measurement scores are consistent over a short period of time (usually 2 weeks).
Readability: The ease with which a reader can understand the questionnaire items.
Key
- Green: Meets validation criteria
- Red: Does not meet validation criteria
- Unknown: Evidence not available
