1. health and fitness
2. disorders
3. mental disorder
4. panic and anxiety

VARIABLES INFLUENCING THE DEVELOPMENT AND MAINTENANCE
OF FEARS IN CHILDREN
by
ELIZABETH A. SLEDDEN, B.A.
A DISSERTATION
IN
PSYCHOLOGY
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty
of Texas Tech University in
Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Approved
Accepted
August, 1986
(c)
1986 Elizabeth A. Sledden
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to gratefully acknowledge my Chairman, Dr. Bill Locke,
whose support and assistance has guided me through our many
"misadventures"
with this research.
The encouragement and input of
Drs. Chatfield, Clopton, Greene, Katnik, and Maddux must also be
recognized.
I also convey my gratitude to the school principals,
teachers, children, and parents who participated in the research.
Many
thanks go to my research assistants, my parents, whose unending supply
of support made this research possible.
The reviews of earlier
editions of this document by David Dybell and Beverly Schneller Jerozal
aided me in my quest to be concise and "see the forest, not the trees."
Finally, I wish to recognize Bob Maul and express my admiration and
gratitude for his selfless dedication to my research.
11
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ii
LIST OF TABLES
v
I.
INTRODUCTION
1
Definitions
2
Behavioral Theories of Fear Acquisition
3
Previous Research on Potential Determinants
of Fear Content
II.
III.
8
Review of Previous Scales
18
Methodological Concerns
26
Statement of the Problem
31
Hypotheses
35
METHODS AND PROCEDURES
38
Subjects
38
Pilot Study
48
Materials and Procedures
50
RESULTS
56
Analysis of the Hypotheses
IV.
, . .
DISCUSSION
57
81
Sex
81
Age
86
Parent-Child Relationship
88
111
Place of Residence
92
Reported History of Trauma
95
Socio-Economic Class
97
Recommendations for Future Research
REFERENCES
102
108
APPENDICES
B
PILOT STUDY
122
MATERIALS USED IN THE STUDY
130
SUPPLEMENTARY DATA TABLES
156
IV
LIST OF TABLES
Table
1
Breakdown of Subjects by Demographic Variables . . . .
39
Table
2
Breakdown of Subjects by Age Group and Average Total
Number of Fears
40
Breakdown of Subjects by Age Group and Average
Intensity Score
43
Table
Table
3
4
Potential and Actual Number of Subjects by
School and Age
47
49
Table
5
Univariate Statistics for the Pilot Study
Table
6
Total Number of Reported Fears by Area Groups
Table
7
Average Intensity of Fear by Area Groups
Table
8
Total Number of Reported Fears by
....
59
Socio-Economic Groups
Table
9
58
62
Average Intensity of Fear by Socio-Economic Group
. .
63
Table 10
Total Number of Reported Fears for All Subjects
...
69
Table 11
Total Number of Reported Fears for Parents
70
Table 12
Average Intensity of Fear for All Subjects
71
Table 13
Total Number of Reported Fears by Sex Groups
72
Table 14
Average Intensity of Fear by Sex Groups
73
Table 15
Average Total Number of Fears by Age Group
75
Table 16
Average Intensity of Fear by Age Groups
76
Table 17
ANOVA
Rural
ANOVA
Rural
ANOVA
Rural
Table 18
Table 19
Summary Table of Concrete Fear Frequency:
vs. Urban Children
Summary Table of Concrete Fear Intensity:
vs. Urban Children
Summary Table of Abstract Fear Frequency:
vs. Urban Children
V
157
158
159
Table 20
Table 21
Table 22
ANOVA Summary Table of Abstract Fear Intensity:
Rural vs. Urban Children
160
ANOVA Summary Table of Concrete Fear Frequency:
Socio-Economic Groups
161
Correlations Between History of Trauma and Mean
Intensity Scores
162
Table 23
Pairwise Comparison Between Category Mean Intensity
Score for Upper and Lower Socio-Economic Class . . . . 163
Table 24
Pairwise Comparison Between Category Mean Intensity
Score for Upper and Middle Socio-Economic Class . . . 164
Table 25
Pairwise Comparison Between Category Mean Intensity
Score for Middle and Lower Socio-Economic Class . . . 165
Table 26
Pairwise Comparison Between Category Mean Intensity
Score for Rural and Urban Groups
166
ANOVA Summary Table of Total Number of Fears:
Mothers vs. Children
167
ANOVA Summary Table of Total Number of Fears:
Fathers vs. Children
168
ANOVA Summary Table of Average Fear Intensity:
Mothers vs. Children
169
ANOVA Summary Table of Average Fear Intensity:
Fathers vs. Children
170
ANOVA Summary Table of Average Fear Intensity:
Male vs. Female Children
171
Table 27
Table 28
Table 29
Table 30
Table 31
Table 32
ANOVA Summary Table of Average Fear Intensity:
Children's Age Groups
172
Table 33
Differences Between Mean Intensity Scores by Age Group 173
Table 34
ANOVA Summary Table of Concrete Fear Frequency:
Area vs. Socio-Economic Class vs. Category
ANOVA Summary Table of Concrete Fear Intensity:
Area vs. Socio-Economic Class vs. Category
Table 35
Table 36
ANOVA Summary Table of Abstract Fear Frequency:
Area vs. Socio-Economic Class vs. Category
VI
174
175
176
Table 37
ANOVA Summary Table of Abstract Fear Intensity:
Area vs. Socio-Economic Class vs. Category
Vll
177
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Psychologists have been systematically investigating children's
fears since the early 1930's (Jersild & Holmes, 1933).
Earlier case
studies were behavioral in nature (Jones, 1924; Valentine, 1930; Watson &
Rayner, 1920) with the emphasis later moving into a psychoanalytic
framework (Bornstein, 1935; Colm, 1959; Dosuzkov, 1949; Finch, 1960;
Leonard, 1959; Pinchon & Arminda, 1950).
More recent research has
returned to a behavioral perspective (Barrios & Shigetomi, 1980; Fazio,
1969; Sidana & Sinha, 1973; Simon & Ward, 1974).
Research in the area of children's fears has been limited.
Only 40
case studies were published between 1929 and 1978, most of them post-1960
(Graziano & DeGiovanni, 1979). Thus, we have little knowledge about the
development, maintenance, crucial factors, and treatment of children's
fears.
The data we do have are often difficult to interpret (Graziano,
DeGiovanni, & Garcia, 1979) and sometimes are misrepresented in the
available review articles.
The purpose of this study is to continue developing the literature
in the area of children's fears.
Reviews of the literature as well as
critiques of current methodologies suggest the need for a comprehensive
measuring instrument which can be given to young school-age children as
well as parents and teachers. A new instrument has been developed for
this study which includes the strong points of the existing scales of
1
children's fears and attempts to address current methodological
criticisms.
Responses were obtained on this instrument, the Children's
Fears and Worries Scale (CFWS), along with demographic data from
third-sixth graders and their parents in the Gulf Coast and West Texas
areas to gain normative data.
This expansion of a non-clinical data pool
is theoretically and pragmatically important to therapeutic
considerations when the severity and "normalcy" of a child's fears is an
issue.
The data was analyzed with regard to content and intensity of
reported fears in order to obtain information on possible influencing
factors such as place of residence, socio-economic status, and reported
history of trauma, as well as age and sex difference.
Definitions
The major distinction to be made in this paper is between a fear and
a phobia.
following:
A fear is a reaction to actual threat which involves the
subjective emotional experience; behavioral response; and
physiological response (Miller, Barrett, & Hampe, 1974).
a fear is a normal response to a menacing stimulus.
It follows that
In contrast, a
phobia is a specific fear with one of the three components evidenced
persistently, excessively, or to a maladaptive extent (Graziano et al.,
1979; Miller et al., 1974). In addition, the target stimulus of a phobia
is frequently ill-defined or innocuous (Miller et al., 1974) whereas the
object of a fear can generally be clearly described.
The severity of fears ranges from mild to severe, with the majority
of clinical referrals dealing with severe fears.
these "clinical" fears from "ordinary" fears?
What distinguishes
It may be the duration,
with those persisting over two years fitting into the "clinical" category
3
(Graziano et al., 1979).
The two year criterion is based on a study
which indicated that, regardless of intensity, most children resolve
their fear(s) within two years whether or not they receive treatment
(Hampe, Noble, Miller, & Barrett, 1973). Although fears of clinical
significance account for approximately 6.8% of all child referrals
(Graziano & DeGiovanni, 1979), the majority of research literature deals
with mildly fearful to "normal" children due to easier access to this
type of subject (Matthews, 1978).
This paper deals with normal to mildly fearful children.
For a
screening instrument to be useful in clinical practice, the performance
of non-clinical populations is needed to serve as a comparison group for
clinical subjects.
populations.
Thus, the data obtained was from non-clinical
In addition to gathering information on fear content, the
intensity of reported fears was examined.
It is unclear whether clinical
and mild or non-clinical fears function similarly with regard to
acquisition, maintenance, and influential factors (Graziano et al.,
1979), so a clinical population may indeed respond differently to the
questionnaire and demographic variables than the non-clinical subjects
used in this research.
It is precisely these varied response patterns
which could aid in forming treatment programs once they are clearly
outlined through future research efforts.
Behavioral Theories of Fear Acquisition
The behavioral outlook is posed throughout this paper, and theories
of fear acquisition are later applied to potential determinants of fear
and the selection of independent variables in the study.
models and theories will be briefly outlined:
The following
operant and classical
4
conditioning; two-factor theory; incubation effect hypothesis; social
learning theory; cognitive mediation; and emotional processing.
Operant & Classical Conditioning
Operant conditioning states that voluntary fear responses are
reinforced by their consequences and discriminated on the basis of
associated stimuli.
The classical conditioning model emphasizes
reflexive fear responses at the autonomic level which are promoted by
previously neutral stimuli.
The originally neutral stimulus occurs with
either an unconditioned stimulus or a previously conditioned stimulus
that has come to elicit a fear reflex.
This original model of fear
acquisition has generally been considered deficient in the following
areas as summarized by Rachman (1977, p. 375):
1) many people exposed to
intense fear-provoking conditions do not develop phobias; 2) conclusive
demonstrations of enduring conditioned fear reactions have not occured in
the laboratory; 3) the emergence of phobias only at certain times and
only in association with specific stimuli are not explained by the model;
and 4) respondent fear reactions instated in the laboratory tend to
extinguish quickly while phobic reactions are highly resistant to
extinction.
Two-Factor Theory
Mowrer's two-factor theory (1960) suggested that fears are acquired
through respondent conditioning and maintained operantly through
reinforcement associated with the avoidance of the fear or anxiety state.
This theory was initially well-received as it seemed to account for the
high resistance to extinction of a phobia.
Mowrer's posited involvement
of the autonomic nervous system in fear mediation has been refuted.
The
acquisition and maintenance of avoidance behavior has been demonstrated
in the absence of autonomic feedback (Rescorla & Solomon, 1967).
Incubation Effect Hypothesis
Eysenck (1976) focused on the perseverance of phobias when
developing his incubation effect hypothesis.
He held that the
presentation of the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned
stimulus could, in some circumstances, maintain or even enhance the
conditioned anxiety response.
The enhancement, or incubation, might
occur with brief exposure to the conditioned stimulus, an extremely
powerful unconditioned response, or certain genetically determined
predispositions.
Seligman's preparedness hypothesis (1971) also suggests
that certain fears are more likely than others due to their presence in
the environment.
In effect, if an action is important for survival, it
is more likely that the stimuli for this action will be included in a
phobic reaction.
Social Learning Theory
Bandura's social learning theory (1969) initially offered an idea
suggesting that fears could be developed by the pairing of an action with
an aversive event (conditioning) or by observing a model exposed to a
trauma (modeling/imitation).
Either process could lead to the
acquisition of learned expectations/fears which could later be elicited
by the associated external stimuli or through self-activation.
The
modeling was to be influenced by reinforcement, attention, retention, and
motoric reproduction of the event(s) by the naive subject.
Social
6
learning theory assumed that both conditioning and modeling processes
function on the basis of their information value, with the observer
acquiring "mainly symbolic representation of modeled events rather than
specific stimulus-response connections" (Bandura, 1971, p. 16). Rachman
proposed a similar notion that there are three "pathways to fear":
conditioning; vicarious learning; and direct instruction (1977).
Cognitive Mediation
Based on Pavlovian conditioning, Reiss (1980) as well as Wagner and
Rescorla (1972) have focused upon the influence of expectations in fear
development.
Expectations are mediators which can elicit anticipatory
emissions of a conditioned response, verbal reports indicating awareness
of the stimulus-response relationship, and instrumental
approach/avoidance behaviors.
Thus, phobias reflect four processes:
1)
initial danger expectations involving social or physical danger; 2)
anxiety expectations or the fear of actually becoming fearful; 3)
negative reinforcement of avoidance behavior through anxiety reduction;
and 4) positive self-reinforcement of avoidance through feedback from a
conditioned "safety signal."
Bandura has also looked at cognitions in his theory of
self-efficacy, distinguishing between various types of expectations
(1977a, b; 1978).
Outcome expectancies are judgements about one's
ability to perform or function in a specific way.
For Bandura, fear
acquisition may be as much a function of the person's efficacy
expectation as of the actual danger associated with an external event.
Fear behavior may also be modified with efficacy expectations relating to
copying functions such as attention and memory skills.
Within this
7
theory, the influence of external events upon fear behavior(s) depends on
how they are cognitively processed, with the most influential form of
processing that of self-efficacy expectations.
Emotional Processing
The formulations on emotional processing by Lang (1969) and Rachman
(1980) are attempts to offset the emphasis on cognition in fear
development theories, suggesting that emotional or affective responses
are more central variables.
Rachman (1980) proposed that emotional
processing is the absorption of emotional disturbances to allow other
experiences to proceed without disruption.
Lang (1979) advanced a
bioinformational theory in which specific patterns of afferent
physiological activity are generated by a particular congnition.
It is
these patterns which are the prototype for overt behavioral expression of
the cognition.
Thus, behavioral change would necessitate the alteration
of the affective cognitive structure to a more adaptive form, in turn,
modifying the prototype for behavior.
Little evidence supporting either
theory of emotional mediation has yet to develop, but Lang and Rachman
are indeed representative of a trend among cognitive theorists to relate
information-processing to affective experience (Bower, 1980).
8
Previous Research on Potential Determinants
of Fear Content
A few consistent trends in the literature on children's fears can
be found, both with regard to the potential determinants of fear content
as well as the influence (if any) of various demographic variables.
review of this literature on five variables will be presented:
A
sex
differences; age variations; place of residence; reported history of
trauma; and socio-economic factors.
Sex Differences
One consistent finding throughout the research is that girls tend to
report more fears than boys (Angelino, Dollins, & Mech, 1956; Bamber,
1974; Croake, 1969; Croake & Knox, 1973; Lapouse & Monk, 1959; Pratt,
1945; Reynolds & Richmond, 1978; Sarason, Davidson, Lighthall, Waite, &
Ruebush, 1960; Scherer & Nakamura, 1968; Sidana, 1975; Spiegler &
Liebert, 1970; Staley & O'Donnell, 1984). While no studies reported a
larger number of fears among boys, a few indicated that there were no sex
differences (Maurer, 1965; Miller, Barrett, Hampe, & Noble, 1971; Nalven,
1970).
Moreover, sex differences were less reliable when the content of
fears was considered.
Pratt (1945) found no content differences between
the sexes, but a higher percentage of girls than boys indicated that they
feared animals, dirt, snakes, and strangers in a 1959 study by Lapouse
and Monk.
Where reported, it appears that girls fear objects with a
greater intensity than boys (Bamber, 1974; Scherer & Nakamura, 1968).
Age Variations
Several studies suggested that there is no difference in the number
of reported fears at different ages (Croake, 1969; Croake & Knox, 1973;
Lapouse & Monk, 1959; Maurer, 1965). However, the remainder of the
literature indicated that the number of fears declines with age and
stabilizes in late adoloescence (Angelino & Shedd, 1953; Nalven, 1970;
Reynolds & Richmond, 1978; Scherer & Nakamura, 1968).
A peak in this
downward linear relationship occurs between 9 and 11 years, where the
number of fears of animals increases.
The peak reaches a high of 64% of
males and 47% of the females at age 11 fearing animals and drops to 8% of
the males and 7% of the females at 13 years of age (Angelino & Shedd,
1953).
The content of fears also appears to vary with age.
Although most
children indicate a fear of animals (Croake, 1969; Jersild & Holmes,
1933; Jersild, Markey, & Jersild, 1933; Lapouse & Monk, 1959; Maurer,
1965), this does decline with age (Angelino et al., 1965; Bauer, 1976;
Lapouse & Monk, 1959; Maurer, 1965; Staley & O'Donnell, 1984). Two other
categories where frequency diminishes with age are fear of the dark and
fear of fantasy creatures (Bauer, 1976; Holmes, 1935; Maurer, 1965;
Staley & O'Donnell, 1984).
In contrast to these declines, there are
increases with age in the areas of natural and supernatural dangers,
"psychic stress," and social/school fears (Angelino et al., 1956; Lapouse
& Monk, 1959; Miller, Barrett, Hampe, & Noble, 1972; Scherer & Nakamura,
1968; Staley & O'Donnell, 1984).
With general agreement that age is an important variable in the
intensity of children's fear reactions, it appears that younger children
10
tend to have more intense reactions to fearful situations (Graziano et
al., 1979).
A corollary would be to suggest that the intensity of fear
reactions should also diminish with increasing age.
Place of Residence
When considering place of residence as an influencing variable the
most widely used concept may be the rural/urban distinction.
Children in
rural areas may be familiar with different happenings than children
raised in a densely populated city and vice versa.
For example, children
raised in a city may be less likely to worry about severe weather
affecting their family, whereas for the child in a rural setting (e.g.,
ranching, farming) this is a realistic concern.
Such differences in
concern may result in rural populations having different fear contents or
varying intensities of fear in response to some categories (e.g., natural
events, animals, safety) when compared with urban samples. Conversely,
urban samples may obtain higher fear intensities in categories about
which they have greater awareness or more frequent contact (e.g.,
physical safety, social issues).
Most of the data that deals with the influence of place of residence
on children's fears has confounded this with effects of socio-economic
class.
Nalven (1970) compared the fears and worries of suburban and
ghetto children and found that the children from the ghetto areas
indicated a greater number of specific fears.
These appear to be
reflections of their immediate environment, with "rats" and "roaches"
being frequent responses.
No other differences were reported between the
11
two groups, lending only limited support to the idea that children fear
what they are exposed to in their environment.
Pratt (1945) researched the fears of 570 children in rural central
Michigan and noted how difference in response classifications undermined
comparisons of his results with those gathered from city children by
other researchers (Jersild et al., 1933).
The most assured conclusion is
that a larger percentage of rural children (approximately 57%) indicated
a fear of animals than did children from urban settings (only 25%).
Pratt (1945) saw this relationship as reflecting the rural child's
greater contact with animals.
In general, both studies did not adequately control for the
influence of socio-economic class.
It is apparent that children in
ghettos have a lower socio-economic level than those in suburban areas so
that it becomes difficult to determine whether that or place of residence
accounts for difference in the two samples' specific fears or in their
general fear of animals.
As used in this paper, the place of residence
factor suggests that the fear of an event may be due to the child's
awareness that such a traumatic event is possible in the environment.
For example, it would be unlikely for a child in a suburb or inner city
area to have come in contact with a poisonous snake and the child would
have no reason to anticipate the possibility of such an event.
Thus,
this child would have no reported fear of a snake unless contact had been
made, as suggested in reported history of trauma.
However, it is equally
likely that the child's environmental situation is directly influenced by
socio-economic status and the availability of better housing.
To clarify
the importance of place of residence in the development of fears, it will
12
be necessary to sample children of various socio-economic classes in both
rural and urban areas (e.g., high socio-economic class in both rural and
urban areas).
Reported History of Trauma
Another factor which may mediate the type and intensity of fears may
be the history or the frequency of exposure to a fearful event or
"trauma."
Here, actual contact with the now-feared object is involved,
rather than having the knowledge that such an event may occur or exist.
There is little in the literature which related history of trauma to
the subsequent development of an associated fear.
However, respondent
theory would indicate that any neutral stimulus present at the time a
fear behavior occurs has the potential of becoming a conditioned,
fear-producing stimulus (Graziano et al., 1979).
If the child has been
in a fearful situation, it is likely that the anxiety will be produced
any time that situation is repeated in the future.
No published work has
attempted to obtain a history of trauma from either the child or a
responsible historian nor has any compared past events with current
fears.
The majority of behavioral treatments for children's fears utilize
procedures which suggest an underlying theory of past events creating
current fears.
Matthews (1978) noted that the goal of reducing emotions
and increasing contact with the feared object in many behavioral
treatments is an indirect statement of causal relationships between
history and fear-behaviors (e.g., systematic desensitization, imagery,
flooding, participant modeling).
Early case studies also employed
learning approaches to produce and extinguish fears.
In 1920, Watson and
13
Rayner viewed the fears of "Little Albert" as primarily learned responses
to a previously neutral stimuli.
Along similar lines, Jones (1924) used
systematic desensitization to extinguish a 3-year-old's fear of white
rabbits.
Similar case studies can be found from the 1920's to the
present, all with an emphasis on treatment outcome factors rather than
the elucidation of causal relationships.
It is suggested that research
explore the developmental history of children and compare current fears
with previous exposure to trauma to more accurately explore the causal
relationship, if any, between history and fear development.
Socio-Economic Factors
Socio-economic factors may produce divergent sensitivities to events
and the development of fears.
It may be that the highly protected child
and/or the child from a high socio-economic setting has all basic needs
fulfilled (e.g., food, clothing, physical safety, shelter) and the only
uncertainty is in relationship and social factors (e.g., prestige,
schoolwork, friends, pleasing parents).
It can be suggested that such a
child would be concerned with these unstable social factors and not
preoccupied with worries for having basic needs met, since the latter are
consistently gratified (Hawkes & Koff, 1970).
The reverse situation can
also be posed in which the under-protected child from a low
socio-economic environment does not have all basic needs met and focuses
upon these uncertain factors of daily life (Hawkes & Koff, 1970).
It is
likely that this child will be concerned with fulfilling basic needs to
the exclusion of "higher" needs such as stable social relationships (see
Maslow, 1962 for discussion of hierarchy of needs).
14
Berecez (1968) and Graziano et al. (1979) called for further
systematic investigation of socio-economic class as a variable in
children's fears, citing the lack of data on socio-economic class
difference correlates to the intensity and number of reported fears.
To
date, only a few theoretical propositions have been made concerning
socio-economic class as an influencing factor.
Hawkes and Koff (1970)
suggested that inner city children may evidence higher levels of anxiety
simply because their security and physiological needs are fulfilled on an
intermittent schedule.
Graziano et al. (1979) speculated that types of
fears are socially determined in that the children from lower
socio-economic classes seem to perceive their environments as hostile via
the violent quality of their reported fears (Angelino et al., 1956;
Nalven, 1960).
Two studies have shown socio-economic class differences in the
content of reported fears, suggesting that the child's social environment
and socio-economic class standing influences fears.
Angelino et al.
(1956) observed, and Nalven (1970) replicated the finding that children
from lower socio-economic class report more specific than general fears
(e.g., dope peddlers, rats, money, violence, whippings). In addition, a
number of studies have suggested that children from lower socio-economic
classes tend to report a greater number of fears than higher economic
class children (Angelino et al., 1956; Bamber, 1974; Croake, 1969; Croake
& Knox, 1973; Jersild et al., 1933; Sidana, 1975).
Four studies have dealt specifically with the influence of
socio-economic class on children's fears.
Angelino et al. (1956) began
by looking at the fears and worries of 1,030 children from 9 to 18 years
15
of age in Oklahoma City and surrounding areas.
The children were asked
to "list the fears and worries you think persons of your own age group
have."
The responses were classified into the following groups:
safety;
school; natural phenomena; animals; health; economic; political; personal
appearance; social relations; personal conduct; and supernatural. The
mean number of total fears reported was not significantly different for
the two socio-economic groups and the investigators omitted any data on
differences in fear content.
Yet they somehow concluded that "Our data
showed a positive relationship between socio-economic background and the
number and kinds of reported fears" (Angelino et al., 1956, p. 276).
With the development of the General Anxiety Questionnaire (GAQ,
Hawkes & Koff, 1970), Hawkes and Koff returned to the idea that
socio-economic class has an impact on children's fears.
The General
Anxiety Questionnaire was given to 211 fifth-and-sixth graders in an
inner city school.
The data gathered indicated that the inner city
children had significantly higher scores on the anxiety scale (p < .001)
than the children in private schools.
Four themes in the fears and
worries of the inner city children could be seen: personal misfortune;
inadequacy to meet external expectations; school; and manifestations of
anxiety symptoms.
The investigators suggested that there may be
"absolute levels of anxiety that not only arise out of interpersonal
relationships between parents and child, but also levels of anxiety that
arise from such things as physiological and security needs that are
tenuously met" (Hawkes & Koff, 1970, p. 258). In summary, the data from
the Hawkes and Koff (1970) study suggested that socio-economic status
influenced the number and type of fears reported by children.
16
An extension and replication of Hawkes and Koff (1970) was done by
Hawkes and Furst in 1971.
The General Anxiety Questionnaire (Hawkes &
Koff, 1970) was administered to 1,201 fifth and sixth graders in eight
schools.
The schools variables were as follows:
inner—outer city area;
urban—suburban area; and public—private school.
findings of the earlier study.
The data confirmed the
Black inner city children had higher
anxiety scores than their white suburban peers.
The same themes were
also found in the responses of the lower socio-economic subjects as those
reported by Hawkes and Koff (1970).
In addition, the inner city children
tended to have lower achievement and IQ scores. However, there were no
significant differences in attempts to present either a fake-bad or
fake-good response on the fears questionnaire for the two populations.
Hawkes and Furst (1971) suggested that the differences in the number of
fears could be explained by differences in "socio-emotional mediating
structures" (p- 349) of children from different socio-economic classes.
They posed the possibility that the responses reflected the harsher
environments of the inner city children whose anxiety is based on unmet
security and physical needs.
Finally, they noted that their results,
given the prevalence of anxiety respones dealing with school achievement,
contradicted some prevalent stereotypes about inner city children and a
lack of motivation to achieve in school.
The most recent study investigating children from different
socio-economic levels was conducted in Tel-Aviv by Ziv and Luz in 1973.
A Hebrew version of the Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (CMAS;
Castaneda, McCandless, & Palermo, 1956) was given to 858 children from
low to high socio-economic levels.
Ziv and Luz (1973) found that the
17
children from lower socio-economic classes had higher anxiety scores than
their upper-level peers, regardless of sex.
Children from lower
socio-economic levels endorsed items such as "Other children are happier
than I" frequently enough to clearly differentiate the low from the high
socio-economic class children.
The authors suggested that lower
socio-economic class parents tended to be more rigid and less permissive
which created more anxiety and lower self-esteem in their children than
those in higher economic groups.
A final distinction between the two
groups was that the lower economic class children tended to endorse
somatic symptomatology-related items more frequently than children from
higher socio-economic classes.
It was suggested that interpretation
incorporate the possibility that children from lower socio-economic
classes might have been less capable of hiding their true reactions on
the questionnaire and experienced greater comprehension difficulties than
the children from higher socio-economic classes.
Two general criticisms can be made of the research relating to
socio-economic class to fear development in children.
First, specific
events rather than general fears which may have inflated the total number
of fears were reported by the lower socio-economic class groups (Nalven,
1970).
Secondly, it is possible that the children from the lower
socio-economic classes tended to have weaker abstraction skills when
compared to age mates from higher socio-economic classes.
Such a
difference in abstraction ability may have facilitated reporting specific
fears among lower socio-economic class children due to an inability to
accurately categorize events and report categories of fears (Graziano et
al., 1979).
18
Review of Previous Scales
What follows is a review of checklists and standardized assessment
techniques used to measure children's fears.
The
advantages and
disadvantages of checklists are included in this section to avoid
confusion with the methodology section concerning the various assessment
instruments.
The various techniques have been used in the studies
discussed in the review of the literature and were the basis for the
development of the new questionnaire used in the present study, the
Children's Fears and Worries Questionnaire.
Checklists Constructed Within A Study
Nine studies were found which used checklists which were developed
using data from pilot interviews (Croake, 1969; Croake & Knox, 1973;
Hagman, 1932; Jersild, Goldman, & Loftus, 1941; Lapouse & Monk, 1959;
Pinter and Lev, 1940; Sidana & Sinha, 1973; Simon & Ward, 1974; Winker,
1949).
A distinction is made here between checklists and fear
inventories (instruments).
A checklist is understood as commonly
developed on a single population and is rarely used in later research;
fear inventories are standardized and used in many different research
projects.
An advantage of a checklist is that it has the promise of being a
more objective measure of fears than interviews.
The influence of social
desirability is reported to be lowered, especially when the measure is
given in a group situation by lessening the subject's contact with the
examiner (Croake & Hinkle, 1976).
The phenomenon may be due to the
absence of a judgmental examiner and the almost secretive nature of the
measure in that one's peers do not have access to one's responses.
19
The ability to standardize responses is a second advantage.
However, it is surprising that few, if any, checklists have been
standardized.
Croake and Knox (1973) used a checklist developed earlier
by Croake in 1969.
Jersild et al., (1941) adapted a list initially
developed by Pinter and Lev (1940).
not found.
Otherwise, replication studies were
The reliability and validity of most checklists is
undeterminable (Geer, 1965; Manosevitz & Lanyon, 1965) with only
split-half reliability being reported as a rule.
Such data indicates
only internal consistency, not the temporal stability of the checklist
(Graziano et al., 1979).
The length of the checklist itself and the type of variables are
limiting factors (Croake & Hinkle, 1976).
Research and common sense
indicate that there is a positive relationship between the total number
of reported fears and the length of the checklist (Croake, 1969).
The
length of the lists found in this review ranges from 50 (Sidana & Sinha,
1973) to over 200 items (Lapouse & Monk, 1959).
It is possible that
discrepant results may be due to differences in length of checklists.
In general, the benefits of checklists are many.
Checklists can
provide the subject with an opportunity to anonymously list all of his or
her fears and even indicate the intensity or frequency of the specific
fear on Likert-type scales.
In addition, checklists can be comprehensive
in nature by providing space for the subject to list idiosyncratic fears
which do not appear in the listings.
20
Specific Assessment Instruments
The development of formal instruments to measure children's fears
has been slow in comparison with such instruments for adults.
The
hallmark of these instruments is that they are specifically designed to
be completed by a child, in contrast with checklists which can be filled
out either by the child or a caretaker and most interviews which deal
with caretaker responses.
The majority of the published literature
focused on the actual development and statistical qualities of the
questionnaires.
With the exception of the Children's Manifest Anxiety
Scale (Castaneda et al., 1956), very few studies were found to be
concerned with actually using an instrument and gathering data on the
nature of children's fears (Hawkes & Furst, 1971; Holloway, 1958, 1971;
Staley & O'Donnell, 1984; Ziv & Luz, 1973; Ziv & Shauber, 1969).
The available instruments can be arranged in two categories (Ryall &
Dietiker, 1979).
One type focuses on intensity of reaction and is
exemplified by the Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (Castaneda et al.,
1956), as well as its Short Form (Levy, 1958), and revised version. What
I Think and Feel (Reynolds & Richmond, 1978).
The second and more
prevalent type of instrument incorporates the frequency distribution of
fears as well as associated intensity.
This category includes the
General Anxiety Questionnaire (Hawkes & Koff, 1970), the Louisville Fear
Survey (Miller et al., 1972), the Children's Fear Survey Schedule (Ryall
and Dietiker, 1979), the General Anxiety Scale for Children (Sarason et
al., 1960), and the Fear Survey for Children (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968).
A brief discussion of the characteristics of each scale is presented
below.
21
Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (CMAS).
By far, the most widely
used instrument is the CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956), with over 100
studies currently in print (Reynolds & Richmond, 1978).
The CMAS did not
actually measure fears but explored the child's tendency or
predisposition to experience a chronic state of anxiety (Hawkes & Koff,
1970; Scherer & Nakamura, 1968).
Taylor's scale of manifest anxiety
(1953) was the basis for CMAS as 42 of Taylor's items were chosen along
with 11 lie items from Taylor's lie scale.
The lie items were not about
anxiety or anxiety-related behaviors, instead they focused upon a
tendency to falsify answers.
Children were asked to circle either "yes"
or "no" to indicate if each item applied to their personal life.
An item analysis (Hanfer & Kaplan, 1959) suggested that the 42
anxiety questions differentiated between highly anxious subjects and the
remainder of their sample of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders.
differences in the sex of the subject were reported.
No
Several studies
found that a subject's performance on the lie scale of the CMAS had
little or no correlation with performance on the anxiety portion
(Holloway, 1958, 1961; Kitano, 1960; Muuss, 1960). Other published
reports investigated the reliability and validity of the CMAS as well as
gathered normative data on different populations (e.g., Holloway, 1958,
1961; Kitano, 1960).
Short Form of the CMAS.
The popularity of the CMAS can be seen in
the efforts made by Levy (1958) to arrive at an abbreviated version.
Levy evaluated protocols of the original CMAS and found 10 items which
showed no significant differences with regard to the subjects' sex or
grade level.
He used these 10 items as the Short Form.
The original
22
protocols were rescored using only the 10 items and Levy reported that
the Short Form predicted scores on the 42-item original form with
correlations between 0.84 and 0.95.
General Anxiety Scale for Children (GASC).
The authors of the
GASC originally developed a scale to measure test anxiety in children
(TASC; Test Anxiety Scale for Children; Sarason et al., 1960) and
developed the GASC to obtain a compatible measure of anxiety in
situations other than classroom tests.
The GASC originally had 80
anxiety items and was later revised to include only those items which
correlated with a total test score, resulting in a final total of 34
anxiety-related items.
These items indicated the child's willingness to
report unhappy experiences involving anxiety, bodily reactions to
anxiety-producing events, responses to a wide variety of situations, and
acknowledgments of situations with painful or dangerous results.
There
was an 11 item lie scale which focused upon the child's willingness to
admit or deny feelings of unhappiness and anxiety, in a word,
defensiveness.
The unique quality of the GASC lie scale was that its
items were anxiety-relevant and in context with the other items on the
scale.
Sarason and his colleagues (1960) reported initial correlations
of -.40 to -.66 between lie scale scores and anxiety scores.
The authors
felt that this was an overall indication of defensiveness which skewed
the results of their research, suggesting that the children may have
indicated more anxious behaviors if they had been less defensive.
Fear Survey Schedule for Children (FSS-FC).
Scherer and Nakamura
developed the FSS-FC in 1968, based on the adult scale presented by Wolpe
and Lange in 1964.
Eighty items were selected to be conceptually similar
23
with Wolpe and Lange's items.
Some were identical to the adult items,
with the remaining questions chosen after discussions with graduate
students and school personnel, all familiar with the area of children's
fears.
Initially the items fell into the following eight subscales:
school; home; social; physical; animal; travel; classical phobia; and
miscellaneous.
Children were to indicate their responses on a Likert
scale from one to five with the following labels:
much; and very much.
none; a little; some;
In this fashion, each child was given a total
number of fears score (any item with a degree of two or more) as well as
a total degree of fear which was the sum of all responses.
A factor analysis of the items resulted in 10 subscales which were
different from those originally suggested;
failure/criticism; major
fears; anxiety—neuroses; minor fears—travel; medical fears;
anxiety—worry; fear of death; fear of the dark; home—school fears; and
miscellaneous fears.
Very few items were found in factors III and VI,
the anxiety—neurosis and anxiety—worry subscales.
An intercorrelation
matrix of the factors indicated an interrelationship between the failure,
medical, and miscellaneous factors and between the major, death, and
home—school fear factors.
In addition, the failure, medical, and
miscellaneous fear groups showed significant differences when analyzed by
sex and anxiety groupings.
General Anxiety Questionnaire (GAQ).
published the GAQ.
In 1970 Hawkes and Koff
It had an anxiety scale and a lie scale which was
identical to lie scale on the GASC (Sarason et al., 1960).
The 39 items
on the anxiety scale came from the CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956) as well
as the GASC (Sarason et al., 1960).
Thirty-one items were chosen from
24
the CMAS, but only those which dealt with the physiological concomitants
of anxiety or those which overlapped with GASC questions.
from the GASC completed the remainder of the anxiety scale.
Eight items
Children
were asked to respond to each item as it applied to them by circling yes
or no.
Louisville Fear Survey (LFS).
Miller and associates (1972)
developed an 81 item inventory which was suitable for children aged 4
through 18 years or their caretakers to complete.
The items were
obtained through reviews of the literature in child clinical psychology,
previous inventories relating to childhood anxiety, and current adult
fear survey measures.
Each item was responded to on a three-point scale:
no fear (1 point); reasonable/normal fear (2 points); or
excessive/unrealistic fear (3 points).
A total fear score was obtained
by summing the responses.
The items were found to lie in three factors
through a factor analysis.
Factor I was a fear of physical injury from
man-made dangers.
A fear of natural and supernatural dangers was
classified as Factor II, with psychic stress as Factor III.
What I Think and Feel - the Revised CMAS.
In order to decrease
administration time, clarify unclear items, lower the overall reading
level, and develop better lie scale questions, a revision of the CMAS was
done by Reynolds and Richmond in 1978.
The length of the original scale
was reduced by 33% with 25 of the original items retained and three new
items added for a total of 28 anxiety items and lie questions.
The original CMAS was reviewed by clinicians and teachers who were
asked to add any omitted items.
The resulting total of 73 items were
given to reading specialists to be revised to a first grade reading
25
level.
However, the authors finally agreed upon a third grade reading
difficulty level with the hopes of using oral administration for children
in the first and second grades.
Items were retained if they had at least
a 0.4 correlation with the total anxiety scale score and had a high
intercorrelation with the rest of the lie items.
Recent research focused
on the long-term stability of the new scale as well as its concurrent
validity (Reynolds, 1981).
Children's Fear Survey Schedule (CFSS).
A self-report instrument
designed only for oral administration was created by Ryall and Dietiker
in 1979.
It focused upon specific fear stimuli and the intensity of the
child's fear response.
fear word choice.
The authors' primary emphasis was on the child's
In order to make the task clear for young children a
process was outlined in which the child would indicate a preferred word
for the concept of fear.
The three common fear words used were "afraid,"
"scared," and "nervous."
The child was shown Picture A and asked if the
boy in the drawing was "afraid or scared."
paired with "nervous" when shown Picture B.
The child's choice was then
If the same word was chosen
for Pictures A and B, that was considered to be the preferred word.
If
however, the child chose a different word for the two pictures, the two
words were given with Picture C to determine the final word choice.
The CFSS had 48 specific fear stimuli questions and two open-ended
questions to obtain information about idiosyncratic fears.
the questions was:
The format of
"Are you (fear word) of (specific fear item) at all?
Not (fear word), a little (fear word), very (fear word)?" The responses
were scored on a three point scale with "not" receiving zero points, "a
little" given one point, and two points given for each "very" response.
26
Methodological Concerns
There has been a proliferation of research methodologies in the
investigation of children's fears.
follows:
The methods may be grouped as
interviews with a child; interviews, observation, and records
of adults; fears from childhood as recalled by adults; checklists
constructed within a study; specific assessment instruments; and
experimental situations.
This variety of measures seriously hinders
comparisons between studies and any attempts at making definitive
conclusions as to the nature, development, and maintenance of children's
fears.
Development of the ideal instrument may prove a pointless effort if
that instrument is designed for isolated use.
Rather, the use of many
assessment techniques is suggested, in part, because of the tripartite
nature of fears (Graziano et al., 1979; Miller et al., 1972) but also
because of the wide variety of skills and behaviors that may be
influenced by fear cognitions and fear behaviors.
The assessment device
endorsed within the confines of this paper accommodates some of the
methodological points which follow.
Social Desirability
One major methodological concern involves what may be called the
social desirability set.
Adults and children alike wish to be considered
"normal"; the act of admitting a fear may threaten one's "normal" status.
Spiegler and Liebert (1970) found that the more socially acceptable it is
to fear something, the more frequently an individual will report having
that fear.
There is also a difference between asking what individuals
fear and asking what fears are commonly found in their peer group (Croake
27
& Hinkle, 1976), a technique used only occasionally (Angelino et al.,
1956; Angelino & Shedd, 1953; Nalven, 1970).
It has been suggested that
both of these effects of social desirability can be reduced by the use of
a checklist, especially when the measure is given in a group situation
(Croake & Hinkle, 1976).
This phenomenon may reflect the more private
nature of the checklist in that one's peers do not have ready access to
one's responses.
In a similar light, the use of a questionnaire may also
decrease the influence of social desirabilty if the child is assured that
neither peers nor significant others will be viewing their responses.
Subjectivity of the Data
The data gathered by all methods is subjective in nature and this
subjectivity may be unavoidable no matter which investigatory method is
employed.
Self-reports and those of significant others are obviously
subjective and so is observational data which is subject to experimenter
and rater bias.
What an individual reports as a fear may be at odds with
the observation of an "unbiased" observer (Croake & Hinkle, 1976).
A study by Lapouse and Monk (1959) investigated the social
desirability issue by asking to report fears and having their mothers
indicate what their child feared.
The authors found that the children in
the sample reported 41% more fears than their mothers reported the
children as having.
It is possible that the subjective nature of their
question, "Does your child have fears?" contributed to this discrepancy
of the mothers viewing their child as less fearful than the child's own
self-report.
Agreement was high (81%) when the mothers and children were
asked about objective overt behaviors such as the occurrence of
bed-wetting.
Although the mothers can hardly be seen as objective
28
observers, this data does suggest that self-reports can be and often are
in conflict with observational data.
The use of strictly observational data may not produce objective
data in that the observation of the child may alter the child's typical
response pattern.
In addition, the use of experimental fear-producing
sessions to obtain observational data is ethically questionable.
A
tentative solution may be to obtain information from the child and
caretaker on an identical instrument and to compare variances in the
reports.
It is possible that caretakers tend to underestimate the
child's fears and worries.
Children generally do not discuss all of
their concerns with caretakers and may strive to present themselves in a
good light by being "brave" and "fearless" children.
Inaccuracy of Recall
A related issue is that all methods relying on adult information
must depend on the memory skills of each informant, yet memory skills are
variable and difficult to control (Jersild & Holmes, 1935).
In addition,
the adult is asked to make inferences about or to label reactions they
experienced as a child or observe in their own children.
It is
impossible that the adult may attribute current feelings and
interpretations to childhood behaviors (Jersild & Holmes, 1935).
Jersild
and Holmes (1935) found that a fear of social criticism accounted for
8,7% of their reported adult fears and only 1,6% of their reported
children's fears.
When faced with a fear behavior which could be
recalled but not readily explained, adults may apply current concerns
29
such as self-esteem, inadequacy, and prestige, thus inflating the
reporting of fears related to social criticism.
Development of Cognitive Skills
The situation becomes more complex when the informant is a child.
A
young child may not be able to engage in self-appraisal to the degree
necessitated by the task of an open-ended question asking for a list of
fears.
It is possible that the younger child can produce an accurate
answer when asked if specific things are feared, a technique found in all
of the current checklists and assessment instruments.
The likelihood of
the child comprehending the concept of fear is taken into account by the
inclusion of open-ended questions to obtain idiosyncratic information.
Comprehensiveness of the Measure
A fifth critique deals with the comprehensiveness of measuring and
reporting all of a child's fears, either common or idiosyncratic
(Graziano et al., 1979). However, coverage of a wide range of fears may
require lengthy questionnaires.
Young children have a short attention
span and every investigator should be conscious of the length of the
instrument used (Ryall & Dietiker, 1979).
The attention spans of young
children should be noted if they seem to be a problem in the
administration of lengthy by comprehensive surveys and arrangements
should be made for the child to complete the questionnaire in multiple
sessions if necessary.
30
Classification of Fears
When the questionnaires are completed, attempts are made to review
and clarify the reported fears.
This task is made difficult due to the
variety of fears listed on the different checklists and assessment
instruments.
However, some classification schemes appear to be more
popular than others as gauged by the frequency of use in other research
(Angelino et al., 1956; Jersild & Holmes, 1935; Maurer, 1965). A
frequent occurrence is that some categories comprise a larger number of
potential items than other categories (e.g., fears of animals vs. vs.
political fears such as nuclear war).
When the most "popular" fears of
children are sought, it would seem axiomatic that the greater the number
of different items per category, the higher the frequency (Croake &
Hinkle, 1976).
Accordingly, it has been suggested that categories be
constructed so as to encompass equal numbers of items to facilitate a
more accurate comparison of frequencies (Croake & Hinkle, 1976).
However, no studies to date have specifically indicated that their
categories are equal in the number of items.
Idiosyncratic Expression of Fear
The child's particular expression of fear has been shown to vary
significantly (Ryall & Dietiker, 1978).
A procedure which seems to allow
the child to use a preferred word was developed by Ryall and Dietiker in
1979 and has been described in the previous section on the Children's
Fear Survey Schedule.
Although an excellent approach, it would be
difficult to employ with a large number of subjects.
The process
requires a relatively long interview with the subject on an individual
basis and may hinder the anonymity of results as well as increase the
31
influence of social desirability factors.
It may be that in order to
sample a large number of subjects a single word to describe "fear" must
be used on questionnaires, with the examiner present to give preliminary
examples of fear-related behaviors and physical sensations.
Reading Abilities
Ryall and Dietiker (1979) also suggested that instruments be geared
to the different reading abilities of children.
instrument to subjects at a prereading level.
These authors read their
Oral administration is the
preferred method of administration with young children but its benefits
in obtaining information are somewhat offset by possible examiner-bias
and other negative influences of examiner presence.
Statement of the Problem
Apart from recurrent demonstrations of age-linked differences in the
fears of children, few definitive conclusions can be drawn from the
research literature.
The aim of the present study was to add to the
existing information on common attribute variables such as age and sex as
well as social variables involving socio-economic class, past
experiences, and place of residence.
The final goal of this research was
to develop an assessment instrument that addressed most of the
methodological concerns presented earlier.
Major Variables and Theoretical Rationales
Nalven (1970) and Pratt (1945) have suggested that the content of
children's fears varies with their place of residence.
It is possible
that the objects in a child's environment become targets for fearful
reactions rather than objects with which the child has had no contact.
32
The investigation of place of residence (rural, urban) as it applies to
the content and subsequent intensity of children's fears was conducted in
this research.
It has been the rule for behavioral treatments of fear(s) to use
techniques related to extinguishing the connection between a fear stimuli
and a behavioral response.
Such therapy suggests that it may be the
child's previous experience with a given class of stimuli (e.g., those
associated with place of residence) which is influential in the
development of a fear.
Instead of placing children in experimental
fear-producing situations of an artificial nature, this study attempted
to gain a "developmental history" from both the child and parents to
begin to determine if the child's natural experience with a particular
set of events increased the likelihood of developing a fear of such
events.
Recent studies have suggested a difference in the content and
intensity of children's fears when different socio-economic levels are
considered (Angelino et al., 1956; Hawkes & Furst, 1971; Hawkes & Koff,
1970; Nalven, 1970; Ziv & Luz, 1973). However, these studies were
difficult to compare because of differing methodologies and unclear
descriptions of results in some published reports.
Differences in
intensity, content, and number of fears in children from different
socio-economic levels are not well established.
incorporated into the present study.
So these variables were
33
Past research has indicated that girls report a larger total number
of fears than boys (Angelino et al., 1956; Bamber, 1974; Croake, 1969;
Croake & Knox, 1973; Lapouse & Monk, 1959; Pratt, 1945; Sarason et al.,
1960; Scherer & Nakamura, 1968; Spiegler & Liebert, 1970; Staley &
O'Donnell, 1984).
The current study hoped to extend or replicate this
body of normative data on sex and age using the new instrument.
In summary, an important goal in the area of children's fears would
seem to involve defining the more prominent processes in their
development and maintenance as a preliminary step to definitive normative
data.
The lay press is currently focusing on children's fears of nuclear
war and the "psychic stresses" that today's children experience.
Perhaps
some exploration of how to determine the "normalcy" of children's
concerns as well as ways to mediate negative effects will result from a
continued expansion of this literature.
Rather than focusing solely on
the "common" or "normal" fear stimuli, normative data on the intensity
and content of a child's fears with respect to the influencing variables
has been suggested as a more fruitful pursuit (Graziano et al., 1979).
Such was the purpose of this study.
Information on these variables may
later be put to use in clarifying theoretical propositions and treatment
programs relating to fearful children.
The Children's Fears and Worries Scale (CFWS)
A new assessment technique has been developed within the confines of
this study and an earlier pilot study (see Appendix A for additional
information).
The CFWS was designed in response to many of the
methodological criticisms which have been leveled at current checklists
and surveys.
A brief outline of these innovations follows below.
34
A major concern in all survey and self-report research has been the
influence of social desirability.
The CFWS was designed to be completed
on a group basis, thereby eliminating some of the individual contact with
the examiner and providing a sense of anonymity when answering the items.
The children were reassured that neither their parents nor teacher would
see their responses.
Questionnaire data is, by all means, subjective in nature and a
reflection of the respondent's self-image, or even an ideal self.
The
subjectivity and inaccuracy of reportings cannot be totally eliminated in
any paper-and-pencil technique.
The CFWS incorporated a "lie scale"
which determined the subject's tendency to be defensive and not admit
everyday happenings on the CFWS in general.
In addition, the children's
self-report data was supplemented by parental responses on identical
questions about the child.
It was highly possible that the child did not
recall certain early events which the parent was able to report.
Although previous investigators (Lapouse & Monk, 1959) have demonstrated
discrepancies between parental and child surveys, the value of parental
information and insights cannot be overlooked.
The largest criticism of research to date has been the failure to
classify fears in a similar manner across instruments and the relatively
limited scope of most scales.
The CFWS was composed of eight subsets of
items (categories), with 10 items in each.
This should allow comparisons
across fear contents as suggested by Croake and Hinkle in 1976.
Four of
the subscales were designated to be "concrete" in nature, meaning that
they focused upon the basic needs of life.
The remaining four categories
were labeled "abstract" in that they focused upon non-essential topics
35
such as supernatural beings and social standing.
The abstract categories
may have required a higher level of cognitive sophistication in the
child.
Finally, several open-ended items were placed at the end of the
CFWS to allow the child and parent to indicate any idiosyncratic fears
which were not listed in the CFWS proper.
Although Ryall and Dietiker (1978) demonstrated quite clearly the
idiosyncratic nature of a fear word choice, the ability to determine each
subject's preferred word would only increase administration time and make
it impossible to print a standard version of any questionnaire for a
subject to complete.
The CFWS used the words "fear" and "worry" and the
examiner was present during the administration of the scale to give
examples of fears, worries, and to answer any other questions that the
subjects had.
Ryall and Dietiker (1978) also discussed the importance of
an accurate reading level of any questionnaire.
The CFWS has not been
analyzed for reading difficulty, but a pilot study demonstrated that
second graders were able to comprehend the CFWS with little assistance.
Hypotheses
The following hypotheses were explored in the present research.
The
majority of these hypotheses were given a nondirectional emphasis in view
of the diversity of previous findings.
Alternate hypotheses might well
have predicted more specific relationships if the methodological limits
to prior work were weighted less heavily.
36
HI:
Rural children will report a different total number of concrete
fears than urban children.
H2:
Urban children will report a different total number of abstract
fears than rural children.
H3:
Low socio-economic class children will report a different total
number of fears than high socio-economic class children.
H4:
Low socio-economic class children will report a different total
number of concrete fears than high socio-economic class children.
H5:
Children with a high frequency of trauma in a specific fear
category will have a high average fear score in that category.
H6:
Differences in average fear scores will be seen between the
eight fear categories when subjects are considered with regard to low
socio-economic class, high socio-economic class, rural and urban
variables.
H7:
Parents will report a smaller number of fears than their
children.
H8:
males.
Females will report a different total number of fears than
37
H9:
Differences in the total number of reported fears will be seen
when subjects are considered by age groups.
CHAPTER II
METHODS AND PROCEDURES
Subjects
The children in this study were third through sixth grade children
and their parents recruited from private elementary schools.
260 child subjects participated in the original sample.
A total of
Two child
subjects were omitted from the sample because of a lie scale score of 7
or less which suggested that their responses were of questionable
validity.
sample.
Thus, a total of 258 child subjects were used in the actual
Whenever possible, one or both parents of each child subject
also participated.
The child subjects were analyzed according to the following
demographic variables:
socio-economic class (upper, middle, lower);
sex; age (in months); and area (urban, rural). According to the
Hollingshead Two Factor Index of Social Position ( Hollingshead &
Redlich, 1958), 21% (54) of the children came from homes classified in
the upper socio-economic stratum, 65% (168) came from the middle
socio-economic stratum, and 14% (36) from the lower socio-economic
stratum.
Females comprised 56% (144) of the sample and males the
remaining 44% (114).
The children ranged in age from 6 years, 5 months
to 16 years, 0 months.
The average age was 11 years.
The median age
was 10 years, 6 months and the most frequently represented age
was
9
years,
2
months.
(See
Tables
subjects by the demographic variables.)
38
1 through 3 for breakdowns of
39
Table 1
Breakdown of Subjects by Demographic Variabl
es
Area
Sex
SES
Number
Percencage
Urban
M
U
20
M
M
L
U
M
L
U
M
L
U
M
L
54
11
26
72
7
4
18
6
4
24
12
7%
21%
4%
10%
27%
3%
Rural
Urban
Rural
M
F
M
F
Urban
85
105
28
40
32%
39%
11%
15%
UU
46
46
M
T
126
18
8
42
18
17%
48%
6%
U
M
L
114
144
54
168
36
T
u
Rural
7%
2%
2%
1G%
M
17%
6%
GRANT) TOTALS
M
F
4^%
56%
21%
65%
14%
Note. The following abbreviations are used above:
Sex: Male, Female
SES: (Socio-Economic Standing): Upper, Middle, Lower
40
Table 2
Breakdown of Subjects by Age Group and
Average Total Number of Fears
Nuoiber
Mean T o c a l
S c d . Dev.
Area
Sex
SES
78-89
Urban
F
M
70
0
90-101
Urban
H
H
42
0
102-107
Urban
M
L
67
0
F
U
63
0
L
25
0
M
M
66
0
F
L
64
0
H
U
47
23
H
41
3
L
65
0
U
52
15
M
45
9
U
38
0
M
41
21
L
31
0
M
70
14
L
73
14
H
H
44
16
F
U
42
14
M
45
19
L
91
0
U
50
0
M
49
28
M
63
16
Aae(Monchs)
*
Rural
108-113
Urban
F
Rural
M
F
114-119
Urban
Rural
M
F
120-12S
Urban
M
F
L
2
58
26
U
2
45
17
M
5
51
20
L
2
50
3
U
5
49
19
M
9
49
15
41
Table 2 Continued
Age (Months) Area
Sex
SES
Nufflber
Rural
M
U
I
33
0
M
3
31
30
L
2
29
10
H
6
56
19
L
4
74
10
U
4
39
21
M
3
41
16
L
1
32
0
U
4
48
10
N
13
49
16
N
2
40
10
L
1
S8
0
U
1
21
0
M
]
38
26
L
1
36
0
U
1
71
0
N
1
38
0
u
:1
63
14
H
:>
53
17
L
I
80
0
U
I
49
11
n
}
54
9
M
M
i
51
18
F
U
t>
54
17
H
4
56
13
L
2
51
23
u
I
47
0
H
I
33
0
u
1
68
0
M
2
74
2
U
I
51
0
M
6
46
12
U
I
45
0
F
126-131
Urban
N
F
Rural
H
F
132-137
Urban
H
F
Rural
138-143
Urban
Rural
F
M
F
144-149
Urban
M
F
Mean Tocai
Scd. Dev
42
Table 2 Continued
Age (Honchs) Area Sex
Rural
N
F
150-155
Urban
M
F
156-161
168-173
Number
M
6
56
15
L
2
55
33
M
1
9
0
L
2
43
30
N
1
58
0
M
1
59
0
U
1
65
0
M
9
49
15
L
2
55
3
U
1
47
0
M
11
42
17
Rural
F
L
1
65
0
Urban
M
.U
2
33
12
M
7
36
10
L
3
53
14
U
I
57
0
M
4
44
21
U
3
57
13
H
2
46
3
F
M
3
49
13
M
U
1
78
0
F
U
1
41
0
N
1
71
0
F
162-167
Mean Tocal
Scd. Dev
SES
Urban
Urban
H
174-185
Urban
M
U
1
40
0
186-191
Urban
H
H
2
46
4
192-197
Urban
H
L
1
13
0
Note. The following abbreviaciona are used above.
Sex: Male, Female
SES (Socio-Economic Standing): Upper, Middle, Lower
Scd. Dav. (Scandard Deviation)
43
Table 3
Breakdown of Subjects by Age Group and
Average Intensity Score
Aitii(Honchit)
Area
Sex
SES
Nuaber
Mean Incenaicy
Sea. Dev.
78-89
Urban
F
H
1
2.92
1.70
90-101
Urban
N
N
1
2.55
1.92
Urban H
L
1
3.00
1.67
F
U
I
1.99
0.84
L
1
3.06
1.67
H
H
I
2.92
1.91
F
L
I
1.86
1.69
H
U
4
1.95
0.55
N
3
1.99
0.54
L
I
2.66
1.J8
U
4
2.32
1.25
H
9
2.27
0.52
U
I
1.91
1.44
H
6
2.24
0.98
L
1
1.65
1.68
H
4
3.64
0.76
L
2
3.61
0.24
H
H
5
2.27
0.54
F
U
3
2.49
0.63
H
3
2.38
0.74
L
I
4.78
1.81
U
1
2.33
1.44
H
4-
2.56
0.99
H
5
3.07
0.31
L
2
2.93
0.44
U
2
2.28
0.51
H
5
2.53
0.69
L
2
2.38
0.72
U
5
2.56
1.13
N
9
2.81
2.68
102-107
Rural
108-113
Urban
F
Rural
H
F
114-119
Urban
Rural
H
F
120-125
Urban
H
F
44
Table 3 Continued
Age Months
Area
Sex
SES
1
1.77
• 1.29
M
3
1.75
0.62
L
2
1.95
0.69
H
6
3.22
1.42
L
4
3.39
0.74
U
4
1.36
0.5O
N
3
1.34
0.66
L
1
2.16
1.85
U
4
2.67
0.69
M
13
2.12
0.58
M
2
2.32
0.20
L
1
2.92
1.95
F • U
1
1.46
0.96
H
2
2.25
1.07
L
1
4.06
1.47
U
1
2.76
1.25
H
1
2.23
1.75
U
)
2.36
0.97
N
S
2.19
0.41
L
1
4.05
1.75
U
2
2.:j2
0.94
M
3
3.16
0.59
Urban N
M
6
2.41
0.61
F
U
4
2.54
0.98
M
4
2.41
0.47
L
2
2.36
0.33
U
I
1.70
0.78
M
1
2.11
1.73
U
I
3.18
1.72
M
2
2.90
1.52
U
I
2.19
i.::a
M
6
2.39
0.62
U
I
2.49
1.79
F
Urban H
F
Rural N
•
132-137
Urban H
F
Rural F
138-143
Rural M
F
144-149
Std. Dev.
U
Rural H
126-131
Number Mean Intensity
Urban M
F
45
Table 3 Continued
Age (Months) Area
Sex
Rural
SES
N
F
150-155
Urban
M
F
156-161
168-173
M
6
2.11
0.21
L
2
2.53
1.31
M
1
1.22
0.84
L
2
1.89
0.66
H
1
2.70
1.76
N
1
2.16
1.28
U
1
2.36
1.18
M
9
2.37
0.69
L
2
1.67
0.96
U
1
1.84
1.21
M
11
2.07
0.73
Rural
F
L
1
2.31
1.37
Urban
H
U
2
1.61
0.37
M
7
1.70
0.39
L
3
,2.13
0.96
U
1
2.41
1.61
N
4
2.10
0.64
U
3
2.48
0.60
H
2
1.85
0.36
F
M
]
2.22
0.49
M
U
1
3.91
1.85
F
U
I
1.64
1.91
M
I
2.34
1.01
F
162-167
Mean Incensi cy Scd. Dev.
Number
Urban H
Urban
174-185
Urban
M
U
I
1.69
0.96
186-191
Urban
M
M
2
1.58
0.23
192-197
Urban
M
L
I
1.29
0.91
Note, the following abbreviation s are used abo ve.
Sex: Male , Female
SES (Socio--Economic Standing): U pper. Middle, Lower
Scd. Dev:
Scandard Deviation
46
The vast majority of the sample came from urban areas
(74%, 190 subjects), with the remaining 26% (68) obtained from rural
areas.
This large discrepancy resulted from differences in population
density in the two sampling areas, as well as the difficulty obtaining
consent from the school officials in rural areas.
The distribution of
subjects by area and schools can be found in Table 4 along with the
number of potential and actual subjects.
As suggested by Campbell and Stanley (1963), it can be assumed that
the responding schools had characteristics which varied from the
non-participating schools.
Such factors could restrict generalization
of results to other populations as well as jeopardize the external
validity of the study.
One characteristic may be the examiner's and
research assistants' familiarity with the participating schools and
corresponding lack of information about the operating systems and
policies of the non-participating schools.
In addition, parochial
schools are not subject to the many local and governmental policies and
regulations as are public schools.
Finally, the particpating schools
may be characterized by an enthusiasm for improvement, increased
understanding and self-reflection of the principals, school board
members and parents.
Regardless of financial abilities, it seems that
parents enrolling children in parochial schools may be more interested
in social and intellectual achievement than the parents of children
attending public schools.
Consequently, the children sampled in this
study may experience greater social pressures than their public school
cohorts.
Due to this factor and the small number of subjects in each
demographic grouping (see Tables 1 and 4 ) , the generalization of results
47
Table 4
Potential and Actual Number of Subjects by School and Age
School
Area
Possible
Actual
A
Urban
270
45
16%
B
Urban
40
11
27%
C
Urban
30
8
26%
D
Urban
30
19
63%
E
Urban
160
38
23%
F
Urban
200
69
34%
730
190
26%
SUBTOTAL
Percent
M
Rural
117
17
14%
N
Rural
65
6
9%
0
Rural
60
17
28%
R
Rural
56
28
50%
298
68
23%
SUBTOTAL
I^ote. 4 other Urban area schools were contacted and
refused to participate. 13 other Rural area schools
were contacted and refused to participate. The numbers
in this table were based on the sample used in the study
which omitted two rural subjects on the basis of their
lie scale scores, leaving a total of 258 subjects.
48
of the present study should be applied with caution and limited to
children in parochial elementary schools.
Replications with larger
subject groups and public school children would extend the
generalizability and raise the external validity of the CFWS.
Data was also gathered from the parents of the children who
participated in the study.
The 65 children (25%) whose parents did not
participate were retained in the data but not used in any of
parent-child comparisons (Hypothesis Seven).
Of the 193 children (75%)
whose parents participated, 113 of these subjects (43%) had both parents
complete the questionnaires.
There was a total number of 186 mothers
and 118 fathers who participated in the research.
Pilot Study
A pilot study was conducted to gain information about the proper
format, content and feasibility of the survey materials and general
methodology.
Children and parents in a private elementary school in a
metropolitan urban setting served as subjects.
The subjects responded
to the pilot fears questionnaires on two occasions and gave feedback as
to the format and content of the instruments.
Revisions in the
questionnaire format and content were made based on qualitative and
quantitative information from the pilot study feedback (see Appendix B
for a listing of items retained from the pilot study idiographic items).
A discussion of the pilot study can be found in Appendix A.
Only
univariate statistics were obtained for the pilot study ( see Table 5).
49
Table 5
Univariate Statistics for the Pilot Study
Source
Mean
Std, Deviation
12.65
4.03
17.73
9.38
3.25
19.11
High SES
11.08
3.78
14.34
Middle SES
10.61
4.02
19.02
Total Abstract Fears
11.81
3.79
19.21
Total Concrete Fears
9.71
3.83
15.61
21.51
6.61
43.82
Females
Males
Total Fears
Note.
SES stands for socio-economic status.
50
Materials and Procedures
Instruments
Each child and parent completed the CFWS as well as a Developmental
History Sheet.
One parent per child completed a Demographic Information
Sheet for each child subject.
The Children's Fears and Worries Questionnaire (CFWS).
The CFWS
had a total of 91 items, representing a fear scale and an 11 item lie
scale.
The 80 fear items on the CFWS were chosen from existing child
fear and anxiety scales and via results of the pilot study.
Items from
existing scales were selected on the basis of their factorial
classifications in original articles and their emphasis on anxiety and
fear behaviors or cognitions.
Additional items were chosen if they
appeared at least 25% of the time as idiosyncratic items on pilot study
surveys.
The fear scale items were designed to fall into eight subject
categories of 10 items each.
When a category could not be completed
with items from existing scales, the idiosyncratic questions were added.
The particular categories for the items were chosen based on previous
research and factorial findings in the literature (Angelino et al.,
1956; Miller et al., 1972; Scherer & Nakamura, 1968). The categories
were: Nature; Health; Safety; Animals; School; Home; Social; and
Supernatural.
The first four categories were labeled "concrete" in that
they represented basic needs and did not necessarily require advanced
cognitive skills to comprehend.
The remaining four subdivisions were
called "abstract" because they were composed of higher needs such as
social concerns and have been suggested to demand a higher level of
51
cognitive sophistication (Graziano et al., 1979).
Lists of the origin
of each item and its category assignment can be found in Appendix B.
The lie scale items were the original 11 items from the lie scale
of the General Anxiety Scale for Children (Sarason et al., 1960).
These
items were designed to test response sets and blend in with the anxiety
items in content and wording.
The 91 items on the CFWS appear in an
order determined by random number selection.
This procedure was
employed to spread out each category's questions, thus alleviating the
effects of boredom and/or frustration in the subject.
A final subset of
items on the CFWS was open-ended questions for subjects to indicate
idiosyncratic fears or worries which were not specified in the survey.
A total of three blank items were included.
Subjects were asked to indicate if each item applied to them by
circling either "yes" or "no."
If the choice was "yes," then the
respondent was asked to indicate the item's intensity or frequency on a
five-point Likert scale.
The anchors of the scale were "A Little" (1
point) and "A Lot" (5 points). All "no" answers, although not on the
Likert scale, were given zero points.
The scoring of the CFWS produced
a total number of fears score and an intensity or frequency score.
As
the anchors were not specific to intensity or frequency, it is unknown
if the respondents systematically viewed the task on either dimension.
For the purposes of the remainder of this paper, the scores on the
Likert scale will be referred to as "intensity scores."
The average
intensity score was produced by summing all of the responses on the
Likert scale for each item and using the mean response number.
The
52
total number of reported fears was obtained by counting all of the items
which were answered "yes."
The difference between the parent and child versions of the CFWS
was in the wording of the questions.
The children's form asked if the
child ever worried or feared something and the parents' version asked
the adult about their child's concerns (i.e., "Does your child ever
worry about...").
Developmental History Questionnaire.
The Developmental History
Questionnaire asked the child or parent to indicate the frequency of the
child's experience with each fear item on the CFWS.
lie scale items was not obtained.
History on the 11
The respondent was asked to indicate
if the event had ever occured by circling either "no" or "yes."
If
"yes" was chosen, the number of times the event happened was to be
indicated.
Demographic Information Form.
The following information was
solicited from a parent on the Demographic Information Form:
child's
date of birth, completed education, current grade placement; mother's
completed education and occupation; and father's completed education and
occupation.
The information about the child was used to determine age
(in months) and current grade level.
Socio-economic status was determined using the Hollingshead Two
Factor Index of Social Position (1957).
This particular measure of
socio-economic status was selected as it did not rely on income levels
for classification and had been widely used in the literature, allowing
linkage of the current results with those from other studies.
The
computation involved assigning the primary wage-earner's education a
53
number from 1 to 7 on Hollingshead's educational scale and multiplying
the number by 4.
A second score was obtained by finding the primary
wage-earner's occupation in the occupational listings and multiplying
the number by 7.
The two resulting scores were added together and are
divided into five socio-economic classes by Hollingshead.
For this
study, Class I to V were seen as a continuum, with Class I indicating
high socio-economic status. Classes II and III the middle socio-economic
status, and Classes IV and V the lower socio-economic status.
Procedure
A copy of the CFWS, Developmental History Questionnaire,
Demographic Information Form, consent form, and an explanatory cover
letter were mailed to the principals for all the selected elementary
schools.
The cover letter was printed on Texas Tech University,
Department of Psychology letterhead and indicated that the study was
concerned with investigating factors of potential influence in the
development of children's fears.
The cover letter also provided a
detailed outline of the procedure for the research.
Once permission was
granted from the principal, the total number of potential subjects was
obtained from enrollment lists.
Packets were developed to send to
parents which contained a consent form and an explanatory cover letter
(see Appendix B for a sample).
All signed consent forms were returned to the schools and
subsequently to the examiner (see Table 4 for percentages of
participating subjects by school and area).
Each subject family was
given a number which was written on all forms (both child's and
parents') for that family.
A packet was made for each child which
54
consisted of a CFWS and Developmental History Questionnaire (see
Appendix B for samples).
The groups of child packets were given to the
teachers to administer, along with a list of the subjects' names and
identifying numbers so that the forms could be accurately administered
without placing names on the forms.
The teachers were also given
packets for the children to take home to their parents.
Each
participating parent received a CFWS, Developmental History
Questionnaire, and a Demographic Information Form to complete (see
Appendix B for samples).
A self-addressed, stamped envelope was
included for the parents to return completed forms to the examiner.
Once the children had completed their forms in the classroom, they were
returned to the examiner and then the children were given packets to
take home for their parents.
A research assistant or the classroom teacher administered the
forms to the children on a group classroom basis, with only the subjects
in the classroom for the administration.
The subjects were asked to
read the directions on the front cover of the CFWS with the examiner
(see Appendix B for a sample cover letter).
The adult remained in the
classroom to answer any questions and help the subjects who had
difficulty reading or understanding any of the words on the
questionnaire.
A time period of four weeks elapsed between the sending home of the
parent packets with the children and a follow-up on those parents who
had not returned completed forms in the mail.
A letter was sent to
those parents living out of the vicinity of the research assistant or
examiner, reminding the parent of the project and asking them to
55
complete the questionnaires and return them within a two-week period
(see Appendix B for a sample letter).
A phone number and address were
given for the parents to use if they had lost the forms and needed
replacements.
Parents living in the same area as the examiner or
research assistant were contacted by phone.
Those responses not
received at the end of the two-week follow-up period were considered
noncompliant.
in the study.
However, the child information was retained for analysis
CHAPTER III
RESULTS
Two types of fear-related data were obtained from each child and
adult subject.
The first was the total number of fears indicated on
the CFWS questionnaire.
Secondly, the intensity of each fear was
indicated on a six-point Likert scale ranging from 0 to 5, with zero
points given to all "no" answers.
The following analyses utilized both
types of data and will be discussed accordingly.
Unless indicated
otherwise, the analyses compared mean average fear intensity scores or
total number of fears reported for each of the eight fear categories
excluding scores on the lie scale (Category Nine).
Finally,
alternative analyses of variance (ANOVA) using a between-group design
were performed on the respective measures.
An extended number of
statistical comparisons was to be performed so the conservative
probability of .01 was taken for statistical significance.
Unless
indicated otherwise, all of the analyses were performed using the
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS; Hull & Nie, 1981;
Nie, Hull, Jenkins, Steinbrenner & Bent, 1975). The analyses of
variance which produced significant results can be found in table form
in Appendix C.
56
57
Analysis of the Hypotheses
Hypotheses One
Hypothesis One suggested that rural children would report a
different total number of concrete fears than urban children.
These
analyses compared the scores in four concrete categories for each
subject, resulting in a total of 1032 observations.
An analysis of
variance was done comparing the total number of fears reported in the
concrete categories (numbers 5-8) for both groups.
This analysis
indicated only a trend toward differences in total number of fears
yielding an F_ value of 4.502 which at 1 and 1030 degrees of freedom
had an associated probability of .034 (see Table 17 in Appendix C ) .
The mean number of concrete fears for the rural subjects was 20.12 and
the mean for the urban subjects was 17.88 (See Table 6).
This analysis
suggested that rural subjects tended to report slightly more concrete
fears than the urban subjects.
An analysis of variance was also done to compare the intensity of
reported fears in the concrete categories for the rural and urban
subjects.
This analysis indicated a significant difference between the
two groups, 1 ( 1 , 1030)= 22.406, p < .001 (see Table 18 in Appendix
C).
The average intensity score for the urban subjects was 2.224 and
1.906 for the rural subjects (see Table 7).
Therefore, Hypothesis One
was supported in regard to the subjects' average fear intensity scores
as urban subjects reported a higher intensity reaction to concrete fear
categories than did rural subjects.
58
Table 6
Total Number of Reported Fears by Area Groups
RURAL
Category
Mean
URBAN
Std. Dev.
Mean
Std. Dev.
1 School
5.880
2.481
5.932
2.700
2 Home
6.614
2.364
5.623
2.484
3 Social
5.910
2.406
6.183
2.662
4 Supernatural
5.537
2.405
4.372
2.680
5 Nature
4.791
2.382
3.565
2.799
6 Health
4.925.
2.532
4.152
2.659
7 Safety
5.880
2.423
5.680
2.750
8 Animals
4.522
2.218
4.487
2.615
59
Table 7
Average Intensity of Fear by Area Groups
RURAL
URBAN
Category
Mean
Std. Dev.
Mean
Std. Dev,
1 School
2.2806
0.872
2.6319
1.116
2 Home
2.2015
0.733
2.7183
1.109
3 Social
2.3119
0.893
2.6293
1.085
4 Supernatural
1.8672
0.783
2.3199
1.110
5 Nature
1.6119
0.600
2.0424
0.953
6 Health
1.8463
0.690
2.1681
0.997
7 Safety
2.2716
0.789
2.5335
1.116
8 Animals
1.8940
0.654
2.1518
0.912
60
Hypothesis Two
Hypothesis Two predicted that urban children would report a
different total number of abstract fears than rural children.
The
following analyses used 1032 observations, as there was a score for
each of the 258 subjects in each of the four abstract categories
(numbers 1-4).
Analysis of variance indicated a significant difference
between the two samples, £ (1, 1030)= 6.765, p < .009 (see Table 19
in Appendix C ) .
The mean number of abstract fears for the rural
subjects was 23.94 and 22.11 for the urban subjects (see Table 6).
Unexpectedly, the rural subjects reported a greater number of abstract
fears.
An additional analysis of variance compared the rural and urban
subjects according to the intensity of reported fears in the abstract
categories.
Again, a significant difference was found to exist between
the two groups, £ (1, 1030)= 30.267, p < .001 (see Table 20 in
Appendix C ) .
The average intensity for the urban population was 2.574
and 2.165 for the rural population (see Table 7), indicating a greater
intensity of abstract fears for urban than rural subjects.
Hypothesis Three
Hypothesis Three suggested that there would be a difference in the
total number of fears reported by children in the lower and upper
socio-economic strata.
The following analyses used scores for each
child from the nine categories, using nine scores for each of the 258
subjects.
The total number of observations was 2322.
An analysis of variance comparing all three socio-economic groups
on the basis of total number of fears did not indicate a significant
61
difference between the three groups, F_ (2, 2319)= 1.053, p. < .349.
The average total number of fears was 40 for the upper group, 39 for
the middle group, and 45 for the lower group (see Table 8 ) .
This
result did not support Hypothesis Three.
A second analysis of variance compared the three socio-economic
groups on the basis of their average fear intensity scores.
A
significant difference was not found between the groups, £ (2, 2319)=
1.801, p < .116.
The mean intensity score was 2.40 for the upper
group, 2.39 for the middle group, and 2.28 for the lower group (see
Table 9 ) .
This result did not support Hypothesis Three.
Hypothesis Four
Hypothesis Four predicted that there would be a difference in the
total number of concrete fears reported by children in the upper and
lower socio-economic groups.
An initial analysis of variance compared
the total number of concrete fears reported by all three socio-economic
groups, resulting in a total of 1032 observations.
A significant trend
was found between these three groups, £ (2, 1029)= 3.159, p < .043
(see Table 21 in Appendix C ) .
The average total number of scores in
the concrete categories was 18 for the upper group, 17 for the middle
group, and 22 for the lower group (see Table 8).
The difference
between the upper and middle socio-economic groups (222 subjects, 4
categories each, 888 observations) was not significant, t^ (1, 886)=
-0.19, p < .851.
The lower group reported significantly more concrete
fears than the middle group (204 subjects, 816 observations), _^ (1,
814)= 2.49, p < .013.
In the predicted direction, there was a strong
62
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64
trend for the lower group to report more concrete fears than the upper
group (90 subjects, 360 observations), _t (1, 358)= 2.01, p < .045.
An additional analysis of variance compared all three of the
socio-economic groups on the basis of average fear intensity scores in
the concrete categories.
(2, 1029)= 2.169, p < .115.
No significant differences were found, F^
The mean intensity score in the concrete
categories for the upper group was 2.156, 2.169 for the middle group,
and 1.988 for the lower group (see Table 9).
This result did not
support Hypothesis Four.
Analyses Concerning Abstract Fear Categories.
Although
Hypothesis Four specified socio-economic class differences in regard to
the concrete categories, additional analyses were done comparing the
socio-economic groups on the basis of total number of fears in the four
abstract categories.
The mean total number of reported abstract fears
was 22 for the upper group, 22 for the middle group, and 24 for the
lower group (see Table 8).
The differences between the means were not
statistically significant: upper and middle, t_ (1, 886)= 0.46, p <
.643; upper and lower, _^ (1, 358)= 0.14, p < .889; middle and lower,
t (1, 814)= -0.23, p < .816.
These results did not complement
Hypothesis Four.
Comparisons were also done between the average fear intensity
scores in the four abstract categories for the three socio-economic
groups.
The mean intensity score for the upper group was 2.494, 2.473
for the middle group, and 2.404 for the lower group (see Table 9).
differences between these means were not significant:
upper and
.ddle, t (1, 886)= -0.25, p < .800; upper and lower, _t (1, 358)=
mi(
The
65
-0.79, p < .429; middle and lower, t_ (1, 814)= -0.71,p < .475. These
results indicated that these socio-economic groups did not differ on
the abstract categories in their intensity responses.
Hypothesis Five
This hypothesis predicted that children with a high frequency of
trauma in a category would have a high average fear intensity score in
that category.
The data for the frequency of trauma was obtained from
the "Things That Have Happened to Me" questionnaire (developmental
history - child's form, see sample in Appendix B ) .
This particular
questionnaire provided a space to indicate how many times the child had
experienced specific events.
However, many subjects used descriptive
words such as "a lot" and "couple" rather than actual numerical values
as requested.
The subjects' use of qualitative words made an accurate
comparison between groups impossible due to the subjective nature of
the descriptive words (e.g., "couple" could mean different numerical
amounts to various people).
Thus, this data was converted into a
dichotomous scale which indicated whether (one point) or not (zero
points) that event had happened to the child.
A similar comparison
between the parents' developmental history on their child and child's
perception of his or her fears was proposed.
However, this comparison
was not made as the vast majority of participating parents failed to
complete the developmental history questionnaire.
The data for this hypothesis was in two forms; the developmental
history was coded as a dichotomous variable and average fear scores
were continuous variables on a six-point Likert scale.
A
point-biserial correlation was computed for history and average fears
66
scores in general.
The correlation of .1410 (p < .001) indicated that
there was a small correlation between these factors.
Additional
point-biserial correlations were performed for each of the eight fear
categories.
The respective point-biserial correlations that indicated
significant positive relationships between history and intensity were
.17, .20, .15, .17, and .13 for School, Home, Nature, Safety, and
Animal categories (see Table 22 in Appendix C ) .
Although the
correlations did not account for much of the variance, a trend
certainly existed.
In the remaining categories (Social, Supernatual,
Health) there were nonsignificant trends toward a positive relationship
between history and intensity.
Thus, at least a positive trend existed
in all of the fear categories for intensity of current fear and history
of trauma to vary together.
Hypothesis Six
Hypothesis Six predicted that differences in the average fear
scores for each category would be seen when the subjects were
considered by the demographic variables of socio-economic class and
area.
The variable of socio-economic class was considered first.
The
average fear intensity scores were computed for all of the three
socio-economic groups in each of the eight fear categories (see Table
9).
Then, pairwise comparisons were conducted between these means for
the following groupings:
upper and lower; upper and middle; and middle
and lower socio-economic groups.
In each instance, the difference
between the means was insignificant.
However, there was a trend for
the upper socio-economic group to report a greater intensity of fear
than the lower socio-economic group, as well as for the middle
67
socio-economic group to report greater intensity than the lower
socio-economic group.
Refer to tables 23 through 25 in Appendix C for
these t_ values and significance levels.
Pairwise comparisons were done with the subjects divided by area
(rural, urban).
The average fear intensity scores were computed in
each fear category for both groups (see Table 7).
Pairwise comparisons
found the urban group to report a greater intensity than the rural
group in the following categories: Home, Supernatural, Nature, and
Health. The significant values were as follows: Home, _t (1, 256)=
3.55, p < .0001; Supernatural, _t (1, 256)= 3.08, p < .002; Nature,
_t (1, 256)= 3.46, p < .0001; and Health, t_ (1, 256)= 2.44, p< .015.
The remaining t_ values and significance levels can be found in Table
26 in Appendix C.
Hypothesis Seven
Hypothesis Seven suggested that parents would report a different
total number of fears than their children.
In this comparison, only
the 193 children whose parents completed the CFWS questionnaire were
used.
An analysis of variance comparing the children's scores with
those of their mothers (186 subjects, 91 observations each, 16,926
total observations) indicated there was a significant difference in the
total number of reported fears between these two groups, £ (1,
16924)= 1135.877, p < .001 (see Table 27 in Appendix C ) .
In a similar
fashion, the difference between fathers and their children (118
subjects, 91 observations each, 10738 total observations) indicated
there was a significant difference, £ (1, 10735)= 428.472, p < .001
(see Table 28 in Appendix C ) .
The average total number of reported
68
fears for children was 49, for mothers the average was 36, and for
fathers the average was 33 (see Tables 10 and 11).
Thus, children
reported a significantly greater total number of fears than their
parents described them as experiencing.
This hypothesis was also examined with regard to the children's
and parents' average fear intensity.
An analysis of variance comparing
children and mothers suggested a significant difference, £ (5,
16920)= 260.1, p < .001 (see Table 29 in Appendix C ) .
A comparison
between children and fathers found a significant difference, £ (5,
10731)= 79.4, p < .001 (see Table 30 in Appendix C ) . The average
intensity score for the children was 2.39, 1.611 for the mothers, and
1.75 for the fathers (see Table 12).
Thus, the children reported a
greater intensity of fear than the parents depicted them as
experiencing.
Hypothesis Eight
Hypothesis Eight proposed that male and female children would
report a different total number of fears.
The analyses were performed
using a score for each of the nine categories for each of the 258
subjects, resulting in 2322 total observations.
Male children reported
an average total number of 4.579 fears per category while females
reported 5.542 (see Table 13).
An analysis of variance indicated that
there was no significant difference between the two groups, £ (1,
2320)= 0.203, p < .653. This result did not support Hypothesis Eight.
Male and female children were also compared on their average fear
intensity scores.
Male children reported an average intensity of 2.158
while females reported an average of 2.572 (see Table 14).
An analysis
69
Table 10
Total Number of Reported
Fears for All Subjects
Category
Mean
1 School
6
2 Home
2
3 Social
6
4 Supernatural
5
5 Nature
4
6 Health
4
7 Safety
6
8 Animals
5
9 Lie
9
GRAND MEAN
49
70
Table 11
Total Number of Reported Fears for
Parents
Category
Mothers
Fathers
1 School
5.85
5.26
2 Home
5.14
4.52
3 Social
6.44
5.83
4 Supernatural
3.89
3.47
5 Nature
3.56
3.01
6 Health
3.17
3.20
7 Safety
3.86
3.43
8 Animals
4.11
4.22
9 Lie
7.67
7.11
35.99
32.95
GRAND MEAN
71
Table 12
Average Intensity of Fear for All
Subjects
Category
Mean
Std. Dev.
1 School
2.5407
1.0679
2 Home
2.5841
1.0483
3 Social
2.5469
1.0460
4 Supernatural
2.2023
1.6052
5 Nature
1.9306
0.8943
6 Health
2.0845
0.9369
7 Safety
2.4655
1.0459
8 Animals
2.0849
0.8591
9 Lie
3.0070
1.7427
GRAND MEAN
2.3900
1.7200
72
Table 13
Total Number of Reported Fears
by Sex Groups
Category
FEMALES
MALES
MEAN
MEAN
1 School
6.263
5.482
2 Home
6.159
5.263
3 Social
6.458
5.675
4 Supernatural
5.131
4.096
5 Nature
4.082
3.631
6 Health
4.680
3.939
7 Safety
6.236
5.096
8 Animals
5.326
3.447
GRAND MEAN
5.542
4.579
73
Table 14
Average Intensity of Fear by Sex Groups
FEMALES
Std. Dev.
MALES
Category
Mean
Mean Std. Dev.
1 School
2.6903
1.8275
2.3518
1.6725
2 Home
2.8062
1.9337
2.3035
1.6869
3 Social
2.7292
1.7763
2.3167
1.5804
4 Supernatural
2.3393
1.7956
1.9535
1.4994
5 Nature
2.0014
1.5738
1.8412
1.8675
6 Health
2.2562
1.7311
1.8675
1.3951
7 Safety
2.6951
1.8109
2.1754
1.5754
8 Animals
2.3771
1.7307
1.7158
1.2758
GRAND MEAN
2.5726
1.8037
2.1589
1.5764
74
of variance indicated there was a significant difference between the
two groups, £ (1, 2320)= 7.762, p < .005 (see Table 31 in Appendix
C).
This result indicated that females reported a significantly
greater intensity of fears than their male counterparts.
Hypothesis Nine
The final hypothesis suggested that different age groups of
children would report different total number of fears.
For the
following comparison, the 258 subjects were grouped according to their
age at the time of administration, resulting in 5 groups, each
comprising a two-year period.
Tables 2 and 3 contain further
breakdowns of the subjects within each age group.
The computations for these analyses used a single data point for
each subject.
An analysis of variance suggested there was no
significant difference in the total number of reported fears between
the age groups, £ (4, 253)= 1.344, p < .254. The respective means
for the age groups, youngest to oldest, were as follows: 57, 49, 51,
46, and 35.
The average number of reported fears for the subjects as a
whole was 49 with a standard deviation of 12 (see Table 15).
A similar analysis was done which compared the age groups by
average fear intensity scores, using a single data point for each
subject.
The analysis of variance indicated a significant difference
between the various age groups, £ (4, 253)= 2.976, p < .02 (see Table
32 in Appendix C ) .
The mean intensity scores and standard deviations
for each of the five age groups can be found in Table 16.
An a
posteriori comparison test, the Scheffe, was performed to determine if
the difference between any of the age group means were significant.
As
75
Table 15
Average Total Number of Fears by Age Group
Age in Months
78-102
# Subjects
Mean Std. Dev.
7
57
17
103-126
136
49
18
127-150
83
51
16
151-174
29
46
15
175-198
3
35
19
GRAND MEAN
49
76
Table 16
Average Intensity of Fear by Age Groups
Age in Months
78-102
# Subjects
7
Mean
Std. Dev,
2.617
.5036
103-126
136
2.4846
.8809
127-150
83
2.3634
.6698
151-174
29
2.0595
.6384
174-198
3
1.4835
.1626
GRAND MEAN
2.3898
77
the Scheffe is a conservative analysis, no significant differences were
found, but a trend clearly existed.
The subjects tended to report a
lesser intensity of fear with increasing age (see Table 33 in Appendix
C).
Post Hoc Analyses
The variables of area (rural, urban) and socio-economic class
(high, middle, low) appeared to be confounded in the present sample
with more upper and middle class subjects residing in urban than rural
areas (see Table 1 in Chapter Two).
Post hoc analyses were performed
to further explore this relationship and to obtain general response
trends on a category by category basis from the entire subject
population.
The post hoc analyses were performed using SAS
(Statistical Analysis System; SAS Institute Inc., 1982).
The contingency coefficient between Area and Socio-Economic Class
was 0.239.
Following this, four split-plot ANOVAs were performed.
Area and Socio-Economic class were between group variables, with
Category as a repeated measure (within group independent variable).
In
these analyses the major groupings of concrete and abstract fears were
treated separately so that each ANOVA had only four repeated measures
of Category with each category having a separate score.
In a similar
fashion, intensity scores and total numbers of fears were analyzed
individually.
The resulting four ANOVAs were titled Concrete
Intensity, Concrete Number, Abstract Intensity, Abstract Number.
Results of the subject population as a whole can be seen in the
main effects of Category on each of the four ANOVAs (see Tables 34
through 37 in Appendix C ) .
In each instance there was a significant
78
main effect:
Concrete Number ~ £ (3, 756)= 19.46, p < .0001;
Concrete Intensity — £ (3, 756)= 21.83, p < .0001;
Intensity ~ £ (3, 756)= 10.22, p < .0001;
(3, 756)= 19.46, p < .0001.
Abstract
Abstract Number — £
These significant main effects were
further examined with the Scheffe at both the 0.05 and 0.01 levels of
significance.
In the Concrete Intensity situation, at the 0.05 level,
the categories were significantly different from each other, with
Safety having a significantly greater intensity score than the Animal,
Health, and Nature categories.
At the more conservative 0.01 level.
Safety was found to be significantly greater than only the Nature
category.
In the Concrete Frequency situation, the same differences
were found to be significant at both the 0.05 and 0.01 levels.
Once
again. Safety was found to have a fewer number of reported fears than
the Nature, Health, and Animal categories.
With the Scheffe at the
0.05 and 0.01 levels, no significant differences were found in the
Abstract Intensity results.
However, using a less conservative post
hoc analysis, the Newman-Keuhls at the 0.01 level. Supernatural fears
were found to have significantly less intense fear reactions than the
School, Home, and Social categories.
Using the Scheffe at the 0.05
level, Supernatural fears were significantly more frequent than the
fears in the other abstract categories of School, Home, and Social.
At
the 0.01 level, Supernatural was found to be significantly greater than
only the Social category.
In summary, these post hoc analyses found
that the Safety category had significantly more intense and less
frequent fears than the other concrete categories.
The Supernatural
79
category was found to be significantly less intense and more frequent
than the remaining three abstract categories.
Two interaction effects were found to be significant in the
Concrete Frequency ANOVA (see Table 34 in Appendix C ) .
The simple main
effect of Area by Category was significant, £ (3, 756)= 4.237,
p < .0055.
Analysis of this effect demonstrated that the rural and
urban groups differed significantly within the Nature category, £ (1,
252)= 4.956, p < .027.
The rural group responded more frequently than
the urban group, and a small general trend was noted for rural subjects
to endorse more items supporting the information found in Hypothesis
One.
The simple main effect of Area by Socio-Economic Class by
Category was also significant, £ (6, 756)= 2.767, p > .0115.
The
rural groups differed in the Health and Animal categories, with the
lower socio-economic class subjects reporting the greatest number of
fears and the upper class subjects the least number of fears.
A
similar trend was found in response to the Nature category with lower
class subjects reporting the most fears and upper class subjects the
least.
In the Animal category, a different trend was found with the
lower and upper classes reporting the most fears and middle class
subjects the least number of fears.
Two main effects were found to be significant within the four
ANOVAs.
In the area of Concrete Intensity, the main effect of Area was
significant, £ (1, 252)= 5.433, p < .02 (see Table 35 in Appendix C ) .
This parallels the results found in Hypothesis One that children in
urban areas reported significantly more intense fear reactions to the
Concrete categories than did the children from rural areas.
In
80
addition, for the Abstract Intensity ANOVA, the main effect of Area was
significant, £ (1, 252)= 6.318, p < .0126 (see Table 37 in Appendix
C ) . This follows the pattern of results found in Hypothesis Two that
children in urban areas reported significantly more intense fear
reactions than children in rural areas to the Abstract fear categories.
CHAPTER IV
DISCUSSION
The results of this study, as presented in Chapter Three, are
discussed and critiqued below.
The discussion is organized around the
independent variables of sex, age, parent-child relationship, place of
residence, reported history of trauma, and socio-economic class.
The
chapter will conclude with recommendations for future research.
Sex
The first variable to be discussed is that of the sex of the
child.
It is clear that the female and male subjects of this study
were alert to similar number of fears, yet males remained more subdued
in their reported reactions to these fears.
Extant research has
consistently indicated that female children report more fears than
males (Angelino et al., 1956; Bamber, 1974; Croake, 1969; Croake &
Knox, 1973; Lapouse & Monk, 1959; Pratt, 1945; Reynolds & Richmond,
1978; Sarason et al., 1960; Scherer & Nakamura, 1968; Sidana, 1975;
Spiegler & Liebert, 1970; Staley & O'Donnell, 1984).
That finding was
not replicated in the present study as the total number of fears was
similar for male and female children.
However, earlier findings with
regard to the intensity of fears (Bamber 1974; Scherer & Nakmura, 1968)
were replicated as females reported a greater intensity of fear than
their male counterparts (see Tables 13 and 14).
81
82
These different results were obtained from a questionnaire
improved in several respects over past instruments.
Among these
refinements was the introduction of categories of fear content that
were equivalent in scope so as to facilitate comparisons across fear
categories.
It may be that having equivalent categories removed the
differences in number of fears which have been reported by males and
females in the past.
Males may have been more sensitive toward the
added questions, raising their reported number of fears to the levels
reported by female subjects.
Other studies which obtained differences
in intensity scores employed a Likert-type measurement similar to the
one used on the CFWS.
The Likert format allows for a wider range of
responses than does the yes/no format used to obtain a total number of
fears.
It is suggested that this more sensitive form of measurement
may have been influential in obtaining differing intensity scores from
male and female children on the CFWS.
The present findings could also be accounted for by associated
research on changes in parental attitudes and behaviors.
Specific
speculations in the areas of adult modeling, attitudes on sex roles,
warmth, and the increase in working mothers will be discussed below.
It is thought that behaviors modeled by significant adults (Bandura,
1969, 1971) and those presented in media-reinforced stereotypes
(Greenberg & Heeter, 1983; Roberts, 1983) are likely to influence
children's behaviors, sex roles, and fear response patterns.
It has
been suggested that sex role orientation is acquired by the age of
three years via contact with significant adults (Fleishman, 1983) and
83
that parental attitudes concerning sex roles are very influential in
the child's sexual identity formation.
Recent changes in media depiction of females may have influenced
the finding in the present research that female and male children were
just as likely to fear, or report fearing something.
The media
emphasis on the "supermom" image, suggesting that women should be able
to handle multiple roles and fulfill all societal expectations with
ease (Geis, Brown, Hennings, & Porter, 1984; Haskell, 1979; Merriam &
Hyer, 1984; Seggar, 1975) is being expressed in the current aspiration
of young girls to create dual-career households and a declining
interest in family development (Merriam & Hyer, 1984).
It is possible
that the young females in the present study aspired to similar goals
and presented themselves as capable and not needing to rely on
affection/emotional support from others, thus indicating relatively few
fears.
Admittedly, the "new" sex roles tend to over-exaggerate female
independence and represent the extreme end of the male/female or
dependent/independent spectrums.
The more "traditional" sex roles at the opposite end of the
spectrum may have influenced the subjects' reports of fear intensity.
As these long-lasting models have more visibility in the media, the
female subjects may have responded in a manner indicating the same
number of fears as males, yet with more intensity, depicting the more
sensitive, emotionally expressive media model of feminity (Greenberg,
Richard, & Henderson, 1980; Henderson & Greenberg, 1980; McGhee, 1975).
In a similar manner, the traditional depiction of brave and capable
male media personalities and cartoon characters (Busby, 1974; Greenberg
84
et al., 1980; Henderson & Greenberg, 1980; Mayes & Valentine, 1979;
McGhee, 1975; Miller & Reeves, 1976) may have influenced male children
to represent themselves as self-reliant and manly by indicating a small
number and low intensity of fears.
It is predicted that differences in
fear intensity will continue to reflect trends in stereotypic sex roles
as depicted in the media.
This trend should continue as young children
are most likely to be influenced by and learn from the media,
especially television, lacking the experience and cognitive skills to
evaluate social messages and their content (Comstock, Chaffee, Katzman,
McCombs, & Roberts, 1978; Roberts, 1983; Roberts & Bachen, 1981).
The large body of research on parental influence on children's sex
roles can be extended to the current findings on children's fears.
Emotional expression, including fears, is a facet of one's sex role
concept (Papalia & Olds, 1978).
As such, traditional feminine roles
accomodate fear expression, whereas masculine stereotypes do not.
Parents may be able to influence the amount of fears expressed by a
child through encouragement of a particular sex role stereotype.
The
literature consistently demonstrates the differential impact of fathers
and mothers on sex-typing their children.
Johnson (1983) and
Hetherington (1970) suggest that the father figure is most important in
fostering sex role development since he will respond to sons and
daughters differently, whereas the mother does not.
Once the child is
past preschool age, the father becomes demanding and critical of his
son, yet indulgent and affectionate toward his daughter (Johnson,
1963).
Since traditional feminine roles include responsiveness to the
feelings of others and masculine roles emphasize control and
85
manipulation of the environment and others, the influence of the father
in sex role development could be very substantial (Hetherington &
Parke, 1975).
Mothers appear to have little influence on sex role
acquisition of their sons and only marginal influence on their
daughters (Hetherington & Parke, 1975).
In fact, highly feminine
mothers do not have daughters any higher in feminine traits than
moderately feminine mothers (Hetherington, 1967).
Displays of parental warmth appear to have a great impact on sex
role development in children, especially when same-sex parents are
considered (Bronson, 1959; Mussen & Distler, 1959; Mussen & Rutherford,
1963; Payne & Mussen, 1956). However, when both parents are nurturant,
boys tend to rate the father higher than the mother in warmth
(Hetherington, 1967; Rothbart & Macoby, 1966). This pattern is most
apparent in boys rated high in masculinity (Hetherington, 1970).
In
contrast, highly feminine girls rate both parents high in warmth
(Hetherington, 1970) further supporting the suggestion that fathers are
more influential in the formation of appropriate sex roles in children.
Studies have shown that contented non-working and working mothers
display more warmth and positive feelings toward their children than
unhappy working and non-working mothers (Hoffman, 1961; Yarrow, Scott,
DeLeeuw, & Heineg, 1962).
Although the impact of maternal warmth on
sex role development is minimal, it seems that the critical variable is
the mother's satisfaction with her occupational situation.
One would
expect that contented working women, despite less time with their
children, display the same amount of warmth and nurturance toward their
children as do non-working mothers.
Daughters of working mothers tend
86
to perceive fewer differences between males and females than do
daughters of non-working mothers (Broverman, Vogel, Broverman,
Clarkson, & Rosenkrantz, 1972). More specifically, daughters of
working mothers preceive women in general as more competent and males
and females equal in competency and expression of warmth (Broverman et
al., 1972).
In summary, the findings of the present study that males and
females reported a similar number and dissimilar intensity of fears can
be accounted for by the innovations in the format and content of the
CFWS.
These trends should be replicated with different subject
populations in the future.
More removed speculations involve the
influence of both traditional and newer sex role stereotypes on the
male and female subjects respectively.
It is possible that an
instrument such as the CFWS can help track the influence of parental
expectations and media influence on sex roles as it pertains to
admission of fears.
Further clarification of these issues may be aided
by the inclusion of a sex role attitude survey for the parents and a
masculinity-femininity scale for the child subjects.
Age
A second variable manipulated in the current research was that of
the child's age.
The literature includes contradictory findings in
that some studies report that the number and intensity of fears
declines with age (Angelino & Shedd, 1953; Graziano et al., 1979;
Nalven, 1970; Reynolds & Richmond, 1978; Scherer & Nakamura, 1968:
Staley & O'Donnell, 1984) and other studies indicate no differences in
87
the number of fears as a function supporting one of these opposing
positions.
The children in the present study were divided into five
age groups, each ranging 2 years.
The distribution of ages in the
study was wide, from 6 years-5 months to 16 years.
Two of the age
groups had less than ten subjects in each, suggesting that the
following interpretations and findings be treated as accurate, yet with
some degree of caution.
Children did not report significantly different total numbers of
fears when inspected by age groups (see Table 15).
It was also found
that children in the various age groups reported slightly different
fear intensity responses, with the intensity decreasing with age (see
Table 16).
These results replicated previous findings of no
differences in the total number of reported fears at different ages
(Croake, 1969; Croake & Knox, 1973; Lapouse & Monk, 1959; Maurer, 1965)
as well as declines in fear intensity with increasing age of the child
(Graziano et al., 1979).
It is clear that children in the current study reported similar
number of fears at all ages, yet were able to temper the intensity of
their reactions as they grew older.
This trend can be attributed most
fully to increased developments in cognitive abilities and logic as
children mature.
For example, the preschool child's thought patterns
can be characterized by egocentrism, focusing on one aspect of a
situation, and the concept of irreversability (Flavell, 1963).
These
traits could easily promote fear responses to a higher level of
intensity as the young child is unable to consider alternative coping
methods.
The concept of intentionality allows school-aged children to
88
better understand the distinction between accidental and intended
trauma (Kohlberg, 1964).
A correlated possibility for school-age
children would be the prospect that they may better work through
potential trauma via imagination and mental rehearsal than younger
children by using symbols to carry out mental operations (Papalia &
Olds, 1978).
This type of cognitive rehearsal may decrease the
perceived intensity of the fear by providing the child with some
feeling(s) of control.
In addition, adolescents, more so than
children, are able to consider a greater number of possible
relationships and solutions to a problem, using a process of
elimination to find the correct deduction (Papalia & Olds, 1978).
Clearly, the adolescent is better equipped to analyze traumatic events
and fears than the younger child, creating a noticeable decrease in the
intensity of fear reactions as demonstrated by the present findings on
the CFWS.
Parent-Child Relationship
The relationship between parental report and child's self report
was explored in the present investigation to add to the body of
literature started by Lapouse and Monk (1958) suggesting that these
reports are at variance when the topic is fears.
It was found that
children in the present study generally reported a significantly larger
number and greater intensity of fears than their parents reported (see
Tables 10 through 12, and 27 through 30).
In the content areas of
Safety and Home, parent and child responses were at a larger variance
than in the remaining categories.
Parents described their children as
89
having slightly fewer safety-related fears and more home-related fears
than were indicated by the children.
Concerns about the reliability and validity of parental reports
(e.g., Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1978; Haggard, Brekstad, & Skard, 1966;
Humphreys & Ciminero, 1979; Mash & Terdal, 1981; Pyles, Stolz, &
MacFarlane, 1935; Yarrow, Campbell, & Burton, 1970) can be applied to
and supported by the present results.
One suggestion has been that the
influence of social desirability increases parental reports of positive
behaviors (Evans & Nelson, 1977; McCord & McCord, 1961; Mednick &
Shaffer, 1963; Wenar & Coulter, 1962).
It can be said that low
validity is a result of parental efforts to depict positive images of
themselves and their children.
Within the confines of the current
study, it is suggested that parents reported fewer fears and lesser
intensities in order to depict their children in the best possible
light.
Parents and children have been found to be more reliable reporters
when specific behaviors are assessed than when reporting on ill-defined
behaviors or personality variables (Eyberg & Johnson, 1974; Haggard et
al., 1960; Lapouse & Monk, 1958; Lobitz & Johnston, 1975; Peed,
Roberts, & Forehand, 1977; Walter & Gilmore, 1973; Yarrow et al.,
1970).
With this issue in mind, it is not surprising that there were
differences between parent and child data on the CFWS as it asks for
observations and subjective impressions of fear behavior(s).
More specificially, differences in the Safety category may be due
to the effect of parents' struggles to teach children personal safety
skills as well as media messages that children do not necessarily
90
protect themselves.
Although the majority of such messages focus on
prevention of sexual assault, many are concerned with general safety
skills (Bowen, 1984; Fields, 1984; Hechinger, 1984, 1985; Kleinmann,
1984; Spock, 1984; "When you can't," 1984). The increase in safety
education for parents (Roberts, Elkins, & Royal, 1984), safety skills
acquisition programs for children (Jones, Kazdin, & Haney, 1981;
Peterson, 1984; Poche, Brouwer & Swearingen, 1981; Roberts & Fanurik,
1985; Yeaton & Bailey, 1978) and developmental perspectives in health
care (Maddux, Roberts, Sledden, & Wright, 1986) may have contributed to
parental concern that children are not afraid of many situations, thus
depicting their child(ren) as less fearful on the CFWS.
The trend on the CFWS for the parents to report more home-related
fears may be related to the amount of time the parent observed the
child in the home as compared to other environments.
However, time
spent with the child was not part of the obtained demographic
information.
Certainly a parent is more likely to view fear reactions
to home and family events than to events occuring outside of the home.
In addition, parents are more likely to discuss these events, thus
raising their awareness of the child's feelings about these topics.
Such areas are highlighted in the Home category of the CFWS and include
such content as illness or death of family members, nighttime fears,
and fear of parental divorce or separation.
Thus, parents may have
been more aware of and endorsed more items in this category.
In summary, the present results support a previous finding that
parental reports on subjective areas (such as fear behaviors) tend to
be at variance with the child's self-report.
In addition, theoretical
91
concerns about the validity of such reports have been demonstrated,
lending further support to suggestions that parental reports be viewed
cautiously as trends.
It may be a more fruitful prusuit in the future
to develop parental checklists that focus on specific, observable
behaviors which correspond to more subjective personality and
temperamental variables such as fears and worries.
Place of Residence
Children from rural and urban areas were sampled from the upper,
middle, and lower socio-economic classes to reduce any confounding
effects between residence and socio-economic factors.
It was predicted
that children residing in different environments would diverge in the
events/stimuli with which they were familiar and be more likely to fear
those events deemed possible.
Difficulties in obtaining school consent
and cooperation as well as in sampling procedures resulted in an
unequal distribution of subjects by residence with the urban subjects
comprising 74% of the sample (see Tables 1 through 3 for further
subject breakdowns).
Accordingly, caution is warranted in
interpretations due to the unequal distribution of subjects.
As predicted, the rural subjects reported slightly more concrete
fears than their urban cohorts (see Tables 6 and 17), most specifically
in the Nature category.
Surprisingly, the subjects from rural areas
also reported more abstract fears (see Tables 6 and 19).
The urban
subjects reported a greater intensity of both concrete and abstract
fears (see Tables 7, 18, and 20), most noticeably in the Home,
Supernatural, Nature, and Health categories (see Table 26).
In
92
general, the trend was for rural subjects to report more fears and for
urban subjects to report a greater intensity of fear reaction(s).
The
interaction between area and socio-economic class in the sampling
procedures was most pronounced in the Concrete Frequency analyses.
The
pattern for children from low socio-economic classes to report more
fears than those from middle or upper classes was found for rural
subjects in the Health and Animal content areas and for urban class
children in the Nature content area.
In contrast, lower and upper
class children reported more fears of Animals than did middle
socio-economic class children in urban areas.
Earlier research (Nalven, 1970; Pratt, 1945) had suggested that
response patterns are related to exposure to events within the
subject's environment.
Such a theory is not supported by the present
results in that children from rural areas reported a greater number of
fears regardless of the category content.
This study points out a
previously unreported trend in which children in rural areas were more
sensitized to dangers, thus reported more fears, yet maintained a
degreee of control over their worries by tempering the intensity.
In
contrast, subjects from urban areas reported fewer yet more stressful
and intense concerns.
It may have been that the format of the CFWS
presented more possible dangers, thus increasing the number of
endorsements by rural children and allowed the urban children to
reflect upon and discriminate between their fears by indicating varying
degrees of intensity on the Likert-type scale.
Indeed, young age and a
relative lack of cognitive sophistication may have moved the subjects
toward a dichotomous response format, indicating only those fears about
93
which they felt strongly.
Several non-manipulated factors can also be
called upon to account for the findings in regard to place of residence
and will be discussed below.
It may be that children in rural areas expressed more fears due to
the relatively greater strength of the family unit.
Although little
emphasis has been placed on describing the "healthy" family, it has
been said that individuality and autonomy are balanced with family
closeness (Bodin, 1981; Kerr, 1981; Whitaker & Keith, 1981). Framo
(1981) goes further to say that open, honest and clear communication is
the hallmark of healthy, well-integrated families.
In addition, the
number of skill-acquisition programs used in marital and family therapy
(e.g., Blechman & Olson, 1976; Carkhuff, 1973; Garland, 1978; Gottman,
Markman, Notarious, & Gonso, 1976; Kieren, Henton, & Marotz, 1975)
serve to highlight the importance of communication and problem-solving
skills.
The rural family continues to display interdependency and
closeness through a significantly lower rate of single-parenting,
dual-employment families, divorce, and small family size than do urban
families (Coward & Smith, 1982), even in the face of severe economic
hardships.
One may hypothesize that rural children are encouraged to
express themselves more freely and receive acceptance and encouragement
in dealing with their worries and fears within a more secure and stable
family system than urban children.
Conversely, the children from the
urban areas may have been less willing to express fear because of
anticipated rejection by peers or significant adult figures.
The differences in expression of fear intensity were striking
especially in the categories of Home, Nature, Health, and Supernatural.
94
These findings suggested that although urban children may not report as
large a number of fears, they express stronger fear reactions.
It is
possible that urban children are more sensitive to fears and anxieties
than rural children due to harsher environmental conditions which
foster fewer but possibly more serious, imposing traumas.
If the trend
of the present research continues to be demonstrated, it may be that
environment maintains a strong influence over intensity, rather than
the frequency or number, of childhood fears.
Widespread urban education and occupational mobility requires
frequent adaptations to new situations and relationships, as well as
the concomitant stressors of spatial mobility fostered by relocations
(Curtis, 1959) may have contributed to the greater reported intensity
of fears in the Home category.
Nature and Health concerns may have
been inflated by exposure to biological hazards found in urban areas
such as air pollution (Butler, 1976, Carr, 1965, Esposito, 1970), and
noise pollution (Butler, 1976; Miller, 1971). Furthermore, the
negative psychological, social, and biological impact of crowding has
been well documented in empirical and observational studies (e.g.,
Butler, 1976; Freedman, 1975; Levi, 1971; Seeman, 1972; Taviss, 1969).
Crowding and rapid population growth may continue to be a very
influential factor in increasing the intensity of urban fears and may
have produced the new result of greater urban intensities in the
present research.
Indeed, today 26 metropolitan areas in the world
have populations greater than 5 million and the number of such areas is
expected to reach 60 by the year 2000 (UNESCO, 1985).
95
Clearly, the results of the present study neither reinforce nor
discount interventions for fear reduction that focus on the connection
between environmental stimulus and response.
The unique findings that
rural subjects reported more fears and lesser intensities than urban
subjects needs to be further explored with different populations.
At
that point, further exploration into the discriminative characteristics
of rual and urban life will be needed to determine the validity of
causal factors as suggested above.
Reported History of Trauma
There is little in the literature which relates history of trauma
to the subsequent development of an associated fear.
Behavioral
interventions such as imagery, flooding, systematic desensitization,
and participant modeling are a few examples of approaches which suggest
that past events create current fears.
The present study explored
children's fears with their reported history of traumatic events to
further develop the literature in this area.
The interpretation is
based on child informants who may have inaccurately recalled early
experiences.
Nonetheless, recollections are what prompt current fears.
The actual number of traumatic exposures was not obtained due to
incorrect completion of the questionnaires.
In essence, the comparison
was made between current fears and the child's exposure or perception
of exposure to the fear-related events in all-or-none fashion.
It was initially hypothesized that children with a high frequency
of trauma in a categopry would have a high current fear intensity score
for that category.
The overall analysis indicated a small correlation
96
between these factors.
In all of the categories there was a positive
trend between history and intensity.
The effect was of a greater
magnitude in the School, Home, Nature, Safety, and Animal categories
(see Table 22).
This relationship may have been due to the children
having generally more frequent experiences in these categories (and
thus endorsing more history and fear items) than in the Supernatural,
Health, and Social categories.
The personality variables of locus of control and self efficacy
present ideas which may account for the relationships depicted on the
CFWS.
Research has shown that the individual's assessment of control
over the situation or designation of responsibility influences the
amount of subjective strain experienced and associated with a stressor
(e.g., Husaini & Neff, 1980; McFarlane, Norman, Streiner, Roy, & Scott,
1980; Suls & Mullin, 1981). More specifically, when a situation is
perceived as uncontrollable (external locus of control), there is a
high correlation with stress, life changes, and illness (McFarlane et
al., 1980, Suls & Mullin, 1981). In a similar vein, self efficacy
theory suggests that fear acquisition may be related to the indvidual's
expectations and mastery cognitions associated with an event, rather
than the actual danger involved (Bandura, 1977a, 1977b, 1978; Reiss,
1980; Wagner & Rescorla, 1972).
In work conducted with stress
reactions, beliefs regarding control and efficacy have been shown to
moderate the impact of stress (e.g., Lefcourt, 1982, 1983; Thompson,
1981) as well as coping behaviors (e.g., Anderson, 1977; Cohen,1980;
Cromwell, Butterfield, Brayfield, & Curry, 1977; Gilmor & Minton, 1974;
97
Kilpatrick, Dubin, & Marcotte, 1974; Novaco, Stokols, Campbell, &
Stokols, 1979).
In some content areas of the CFWS, the correlation found between
history and current fear may be related to children's real or perceived
lack of control over traumatic events involving animals or natural
events (e.g., tornado, hurricane, flood, earthquake) as represented in
some of the concrete fear categories.
Rather than engendering mastery
cognitions and a subsequent reduction in fear, exposure (history) in
these areas may have produced an avoidance response and maintenance of
fears.
In a similar fashion, an external locus of control and self
efficacy statements related to success in social situations may have
served to increase anxiety and maintain fears, as found in the positive
relationship between history and current social and home fears on the
CFWS.
Future research might consider and assess children's statements
and locus of control as well as their developmental ability to succeed
at tasks when comparing current fears and previous traumatic exposure
as a connection between the two has been demonstrated on the CFWS via
the present research.
Socio-Economic Class
Specific differences in intensity, content, and number of fears in
children from different socio-economic strata have not been clearly
established in the literature and are often confounded with place of
residence variables (Berecez, 1968; Graziano et al., 1979). It has
been proposed that children who have all of their basic needs met are
more likely to be concerned with unstable social factors (Hawkes &
98
Koff, 1970); these children are more likely to come from the middle and
upper socio-economic classes.
It follows that the children from lower
socio-economic classes who do not have their basic needs consistently
fulfilled would be more likely to demonstrate concerns over the basic
needs posed in the concrete categories of the CFWS.
Findings in previous studies (Angelino et al., 1956; Bamber, 1974;
Croake, 1969; Croake & Knox, 1973; Jersild et al., 1933; Sidana, 1975)
were not clearly replicated by the present study as there were no
differences between upper and lower socio-economic subjects on the
total number of reported fears or in the intensity of fears (see Table
9). However, there is some agreement with previous research in that in
the concrete categories the lower socio-economic groups reported
slightly more fears than the upper and middle socio-economic groups
(see Tables 8 and 21).
More specifically, rural children from low
socio-economic homes reported more fears in the Health and Animal
categories than did their middle and upper socio-economic class peers.
In a similar manner, urban children from low socio-economic class homes
reported more fears in the Nature category than did their other
socio-economic class peers.
The structure of equally sized categories
on the CFWS may have provided the lower class children with more
personally relevant concerns in the areas of Health and Animals for
rural children and Nature and Anaimals for urban children, thereby
increasing their total number of fears in these categories.
In summary, then, the significant finding in regard to
socio-economic class was that children in the lower groups reported a
greater number of concrete fears than children from the upper or middle
99
groups, especially in the categories of Health, Animals, and Nature.
As Hawkes and Koff (1970) suggested, this may reflect the fact that
children from lower socio-economic strata did not have their basic
needs met on a consistent basis.
It may be said that these children
were exposed to unstable environments with regard to health care and
animal contact, and therefore focused on these basic needs and
concomitant fears on the CFWS.
Such causality has been suggested in
previous research with different socio-economic groups on fear surveys
(Hawkes & Furst, 1971; Hawkes & Koff, 1970). In regard to abstract
fears on the CFWS, children in all three socio-economic groups seemed
to have similar numbers and intensities of fears.
This finding
contradicts the stereotype as suggested by Crandall, Katovsky, and
Crandall (1965) as well as Rosen (1956), that children from lower
socio-economic homes do not aspire to achieve and are not concerned
with social factors such as rejection and appearance.
The lack of differences between the upper and middle groups in the
present study is of interest and may be attributed to various cultural
changes a described below.
The finding may relate to the upward
mobility of the middle class family, nearing the ranks of the present
upper class families.
questionable.
The concept of "middle class" in our society is
Is middle class now a synonym for "almost upper class"
or "barely lower class"?
Rossides (1976) suggests that upper and
middle socio-economic classes occupy similar positions in American
culture and sociological theory, as well as sharing the strength of the
elite power structure of the wealthy and influential.
ma
In fact, the
jority of upward mobility changes can be found in the middle range of
100
United States society (Kahl, 1965).
In addition, over the past few
decades, shifts from manual to non-manual occupations as well as from
lower to higher occupational status within each group can be found
(Hauser & Featherman, 1977).
Occupational changes may have also influenced findings on the CFWS
by promoting educational and employment experiences for the middle
socio-economic groups and advancing them toward the upper groups.
Indeed, occupational changes are often connected to educational
experiences (Blau & Duncan, 1967; Hauser & Featherman, 1977). The bind
for the lower class families is that many do not take full advantage of
educational opportunities (Sanders, 1977) and thus do not advance in
their occupations.
Youmans (1959) found that, in some rural areas,
one-half of the children from low socio-economic farming families chose
to discontinue their education early, as compared to only one-eighth of
the children from higher socio-economic standing (Bogue & Beale, 1964;
Sanders, 1977).
It is clear that education facilitates occupational
mobility and secondarily, influences socio-economic mobility.
Future research could do well to consider the method of
classification of socio-economic status when occupation and education
are employed.
It appears likely that Hollingshead's (1957) reliance on
job and educational attainment to determine class standing is less
applicable today in light of changing societal norms.
In our present
society, the status of occupations is changing, as is the average
amount of education.
Some low-ranked manual occupations have been
replaced by automation, while the remaining holders of manual positions
have been raised to managerial and supervisory posts (Hauser &
101
Featherman, 1977).
Similarly, other occupations have expanded their
field of expertise and raised their prestige (e.g., nursing, medical
technology, computer processing and clerical postions, early childhood
educators).
The trend toward obtaining education beyond high school
and/or college has an impact on social class distinctions in that
advanced degrees are required for an increasing number of occupations.
Classification schemes need to be more flexible to more readily reflect
the advancement of society's average educational attainment.
In summary, the lack of findings around socio-economic class has
several implications.
First, it may be that economic concerns have
stabilized to some degree and the children in the present study were
not exposed to severe environmental or basic need deprivation as in
earlier research reports.
Second, the various groups in the present
study demonstrated remarkably similar fear responses, especially in
response to the abstract fear categories.
It is possible that place of
residence had a stronger impact on fear development than did economic
standing, or that the sampling procedure did not sufficiently eliminate
confounding these variables.
Third, the lack of differences may be due
to inaccurate classifications of the socio-economic factor using an
outdated scheme.
Fourth, the lack of findings on this variable need to
be replicated in future research to determine if it can be viewed as a
reflection of changing occupational and educational attainments in
today's society.
102
Recommendations for Future Research
Several recommendations for conceptual and methodological
improvements can be made, based on the review of the literature,
previous discussion of results, and accomplishments of the present
research.
Accomplishments of the Present Research
The primary goal of the current research was to develop an
assessment instrument to measure children's fears which incorporated
the strengths and addressed the deficiencies of previous scales.
The
CFWS was developed so as to obtain both frequency and intensity
information on children's fears in eight equally-sized categories.
A
lie scale was used to detect the subject's defensiveness in responding
to the scale.
An innovation on the CFWS was to divide the fear
categories into abstract and concrete, reflecting the required
cognitive processes and basic needs.
A secondary goal was to advance the literature in the area of
children's fears by obtaining information on trends with regard to
various demographic variables.
Findings in the literature were
replicated on the CFWS in the areas of sex, age, and socio-economic
class.
The results were that the females reported greater intensities
of fear reactions than males, the intensity of fears declined with age,
and that children from lower socio-economic families reported a greater
number of concrete fears than their peers in upper and middle
socio-economic classes.
Several trends in the present research were
previously unreported in the literature and offer new points to explore
103
in the future.
These trends were that the children's total number of
reported fears did not vary with regard to the sex of the child,
the
number of fears remained constant with age, rural children reported
more fears than urban children, and that urban children reported a
greater intensity of fear than rural children.
An additional goal was to examine the relationship between parent
and child reports of fears.
To do this, a parent form of the CFWS was
developed to assess the same fears as the childrens' form.
It was
found that parents tended to depict their child as having fewer and
less intense fears than did the child.
This finding adds substance to
theoretical comments that parents may not be accurate informants when
subjective and personality variables are concerned.
Finally, the CFWS
was used to compare current fears with the child's exposure to trauma.
A "developmental history" form was devised to obtain information on the
child's exposure to each of the fears listed on the CFWS.
The format
of the developmental history questionnaire called for open-ended
responses as to number of exposures.
The subjects did not respond in
the intended fashion, so the data was converted into a yes/no format.
Even so, the trend was for a positive relationship between history and
current intensity of fears.
Conceptual Recommendations
The difference between parent and child responses to questions in
the Safety category prompts consideration of the impact of personal
safety skill instruction.
Future research might investigate whether
the acquisition of personal safety skills by children serves to reduce
104
fears via enhanced mastery or heighten their awareness of dangerous
situations and produce more fears.
An additional consideration seems
to be the potential for parental concerns (as fostered by the media) to
exaggerate emphasis on children's safety and create overprotectiveness
in parenting styles.
The finding that children living in different environments (rural,
urban) exhibit different patterns of fear intensity highlights the need
to explore the intrinsic qualities of rural and urban life that
determine this distinction.
Factors of possible relevance include
crowding, work-related stress, relaxation opportunities, and economic
pressures.
Along similar lines, the stimulus value of a feared object
may be related to the opportunity for exposure to it in the child's
environment.
If the child has had encounters with the feared object or
situation, some investigation of his or her self-efficacy statements
may provide some indication of the duration and development of the
fear.
A final conceptual concern focuses on the manner in which social
and economic groups are formed.
In the present study, no differences
were found to exist between children classified as middle class and
those in the upper socio-economic strata.
A more in-depth exploration
of the position of middle class on today's society as well as the
impact of the pressure to become upwardly mobile is warranted.
Methodological Recommendations
The skewed nature of the place of residence factor in the sample
hindered interpretations of the results.
A similar problem was found
105
when the sample was divided into age groups.
It is recommended that
future research replicate the present comparisons using balanced
samples in these areas.
In several instances, the degrees of freedom in the present
analyses were quite large and there is the possibility that effects
were statistically significant but not clinically so.
In future
replications, the data from the child and adult subjects could be
further compressed into a single data point per subject for each
analysis.
Although this will result in a separate organization of the
data for virtually every analysis, it is likely that some findings in
the present research will not be replicated if the error rate is
reduced.
A detailed item analysis of the CFWS is now needed.
In cases
where no significant differences were found between groups, it is
possible that different response patterns within categories exist.
The
CFWS also needs to be validated over time to arrive at a test-retest
reliability measure.
The method used to obtain a developmental history in the present
study was not successful.
Subjects consistently selected subjective
descriptors rather than numerical values to express the amount of past
contact with various events.
A modification should be made on the
history questionnaire to use interval response categories.
This change
may aid subjects in specifying a range of times thay have experienced
traumatic events, and allow an accurate comparison between past history
and current fear intensity.
106
The use of a different classification scheme for subjects'
socio-economic standing is warranted.
The Hollingshead (1957) criteria
used in the present study was chosen for its reliance on factors other
than income as well as its widespread usage in the empirical
literature.
It appears that the classification criteria may be
outdated as it relies on a 28 year-old system of occupational and
educational standing.
Differences between socio-economic groups may
appear with a restructuring of the classification, especially when the
current greater availability of higher education and trend of the
middle class to be upwardly mobile is considered.
Another recommendation invoves the impact of the media on
children's fears.
Media-generated stereotypes of sex roles may
influence children's abilities to disclose fears, but admitting fears
may not coincide with the child's desired self-image. It is suggested
that a measure of the self-image and possibly one of
masculinity-femininity be incorporated into a comprehensive fear
evaluation package.
In a similar manner, children's self-efficacy
statements may provide information on the connection between history
and current intensity as some experiences may engender mastery while
others maintain fears.
Finally, researchers are encouraged to continue to expand this
non-clinical data pool on the severity and content of reported fears as
well as to investigate potential influencing factors.
The results of
the present research have added information on the impact of place of
residence and past exposure to trauma on the development and
maintenance of children's fears.
The areas of parent-child reliability
107
and socio-economic status were less clear in the present research, but
certainly are a contribution to the data pool and need further
replication.
The CFWS appears to be a viable and valuable assessment
tool and warrants utilization in future research as suggested above.
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APPENDIX A
PILOT STUDY
122
123
PILOT STUDY
The purpose of this study was to develop the beginnings of a
multi-focal assessment package.
The package involved parent and child
reports, demographic information, and information on the possible
influence of history of related trauma on acquisition and maintenance.
The instruments used in this study were compiled from existing scales,
integrating the most commonly endorsed items and retaining important
methodological innovations in the structure of the questionnaire.
Method
Subjects
The subjects were 44 third-sixth graders and their parents in a
private elementary school in an urban area of the Texas Gulf Coast.
Subjects included:
27 male children; 17 female children; 36 mothers; 3
fathers; and 5 sets of parents.
months to 149 months.
The children ranged in age from 90
Subjects were categorized by socio-economic
status, with 27 falling in the middle range ($10,000 to $50,000
annually) and 14 falling in the high range (over $50,000 yearly).
Three parents refused to provide income information.
In the data analysis, one subject was eliminated because the forms
were incorrectly completed and six subjects were excluded on the basis
of a lie scale score greater than 8 and/or lack of demographic
information.
For the test-retest analysis, 29 subjects participated.
124
Instruments
The Children's Fears and Worries Scales (CFWS).
The CFWS had a
total of 51 items which represented a 40 item fear scale and an 11 item
lie scale.
The 40 fear items were chosen as the items which were most
often endorsed by subjects in the literature on the following existing
fear scales:
The Children's Fear Survey Schedule (Ryall & Dietiker,
1979); the Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (Castanda et al., 1956);
the Fear Survey Schedule-For Children (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968); and
the General Anxiety Scale for Children (Sarason et al., 1960)
The 40 fear items were divided into eight categories, with five
items per category.
The equal number of items was arranged to insure
relatively equal representation of the reports when fear type is
considered.
In this manner, children fearing one type of situation had
the opportunity to express this relative distinction by checking a
greater number of items than in the other categories, as suggested by
Croake & Hinkle (1976).
The categories were divided into "concrete"
and "abstract" to reflect the different levels of cognitive skills
necessary to process the item and its related fear description
(Graziano et al., 1979).
The categories were also designed to indicate
the amount of basic needs which were met in the child's environment, as
indicated by the prevalence of concrete fears suggesting a lack of
basic fulfillment.
The concrete categories were Nature, Health,
Safety, and Animals; the abstract catergories were School, Home,
Social, and Supernatural.
The 11 item lie scale was taken from the
125
General Anxiety Scale for Children (Sarason et al., 1960) and these
items were similar in content and format to the 40 fear items.
Responses on the CFWS were in two forms.
One indicated the actual
intensity/frequency of the fear on a 5-point Likert scale.
The labels
on the scale were: A Little (1 point). Some (2 points). Much (3
points). Very Much (4 points) and Always (5 points). The other
response indicated the actual existence of the fear (yes, no).
Demographic Information Sheet.
The demographic information
sheet asked the parent for the following information:
child's date of
birth and education; mother's education and occupation; father's
education and ocupation; and yearly family income.
Only one parent of
each child was required to complete the form.
Developmental History Questionnaire.
This questionnaire listed
25 events and asked the parent(s) to indicate if such an event happened
to their child and the nubmer of times they could recall this
happening.
There was also space for the parents to describe any
experience which they felt was "unusual or influential" in the child's
development.
Procedure
The following items were mailed to the principal and school board
members:
CFWS, developmental history questionnaire; demographic
information sheet; consent form; and the Texas Tech University Human
Subject Committee Form.
Once permission from the school had been
granted, a cover letter was sent to parents of third-sixth graders in
the school.
This letter explained the study and asked the parents to
indicate a time when they could participate in the study.
Replies were
126
returned to the school by the children and within a week all of the
parents were contacted by phone to insure that they had received a
letter and to confirm their appointments.
The child and parents arrived at the school and were seated in
separate sections of a room.
following forms:
Parents were asked to complete the
the consent form; parent CFWS; developmental history
questionnaire; and the demographic information sheet.
were asked to complete the child CFWS.
The children
The investigator remained in
the room to (1) answer any questions; (2) help the children who had
difficulty reading some items; (3) to observe the children's attention
spans; and (4) to note the average length of time which was required
for both parents and children to complete their respective forms.
Two weeks after their initial participation, each parent received
a second letter with copies of the CFWS to complete.
test-retest portion of the study.
This served as a
The participants were asked to
complete the CFWS and return it to the investigator in a provided
pre-paid envelope.
Results
The data from the children's CFWS was analyzed with respect to
age, sex, socio-economic status (high, middle) and the type of fears
endorsed (abstract, concrete).
Univariate statistics were performed on
the children's data and the results are presented in Table 5 in
Chapter II.
127
An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed on the following
factors from the children's CFWS:
socio-economic status; fear type
(abstract, concrete); and sex (male, female). The only significant
factor was on the sex variable (F = 16.43, p. < 0.0001).
It is
possible that no other significant interactions were found due to the
limited nature of the sample.
A covariate analysis of variance (ANOVA)
was also performed on socio-economic status, fear type, and sex with
age as the covariate.
Once again, the only significant interaction was
on the sex factor (F = 0.39, p. < 0.0001).
A point-biserial correlation was done between the children's CFWS
data and the mother's to determine their reliability of responding with
each other.
The results were a mean of 9.27 concrete fears for the
children and 6.72 for the mothers, with an R,-, of -0.027.
On the
abstract fears, the mean for the children was 11.67 and 11.41 for the
mothers, with a corresponding R^ of -0.028.
A test-retest reliability correlation was computed between the
inital and second completion of the CFWS by the parents.
A reliability
coefficient of 0.60 resulted (p < .0001).
Discussion
The analyses suggest that there is a distinction in the number of
fears reported by males and females, with female children endorsing
significantly more fears than their peers.
The factor of
socio-economic status was not found to be significant, but the result
may be due to both the limited number of subjects as well as the lack
of subjects in the low socio-economic income bracket.
Future studies
should include subjects from all socio-economic classes as well as from
128
different urban areas.
Similarly, future investigations of differences
in the total number of abstract and concrete fears reported may show
differences if a more heterogeneous population is sampled.
The
subjects in this study were not lacking in basic need fulfillment,
suggesting a possible explanation of the lack of significant
correlations in this particular category.
The lack of significant interactions in the covariate analysis is
interesting because the literature suggests that fears developmentally
appear and disappear.
However, the present study suggested that
abstract and concrete fears did not change in their frequency with age.
Similar investigations with smaller categorical distinctions may
reproduce the developmental trends which have been found earlier.
The
comparison of parental reports with reports of their children indicated
that the children endorsed more fears than their mothers.
The result
suggested that the children may be able to conceal fears from their
parents or that parents do not notice many of the child's fear
behaviors or statements.
Finally, test-retest reliability suggested
that the CFWS was valid over at least a short period of time (2 weeks).
Further research may evaluate the reliability of the CFWS over longer
time periods.
This pilot study also demonstrated that children as
young as 90 months were able to read and successfully complete the CFWS
in a reasonable amount of time, generally between 10 and 15 minutes.
Using the data from the pilot study, sample sizes for the larger study
were estimated using a bound of 1.
The required sizes were as follows:
Urban abstract - 55; Urban concrete - 57; Urban middle - 62; Urban high
- 45. The largest number for socio-economic class was chosen (62) as
129
well as the largest number for the urban factor (57).
These numbers
were then raised to 100 to account for subject attrition and the issue
of generating a sample size for all populations with only limited pilot
data.
This resulted in the determination of needing 100 subjects for
each place of residence factor (urban, rural) and 100 subjects for each
socio-economic level if the data were to be used as a fixed, not
continuous variable.
APPENDIX B
MATERIALS USED IN THE STUDY
130
131
COMPOSITION OF THE CHILDREN'S FEARS AND WORRIES SCALES (CFWS)
Category 1 - SCHOOL (abstract)
Question #
Origin of Item
12
pilot study idiographic item
17
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
21
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
29
pilot study idiographic item
36
pilot study idiographic item
38
pilot study idiographic item
58
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
75
pilot study idiographic item
76
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
78
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
Category 2 - HOME (abstract)
13
pilot study idiographic item
52
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
55
pilot study idiographic item
63
pilot study idiographic item
67
GASC (Sarason et al., 1960)
73
pilot study idiographic item
77
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
81
pilot study idiographic item
84
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
86
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
132
Category 3 - SOCIAL (abstract)
4
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
9
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
22
pilot study idiographic item
23
pilot study idiographic item
41
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
46
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
56
pilot study idiographic item
66
CMAS (Castaneda et al., 1956)
69
pilot study idiographic item
71
pilot study idiographic item
Category 4 - SUPERNATURAL (abstract)
10
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
19
CFFS (Ryall & Dietiker, 1979)
20
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
25
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
26
pilot study idiographic item
27
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
28
pilot study idiographic item
59
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
64
GASC (Sarason et al., 1960)
91
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
133
Category 5 - NATURAL (concrete)
1
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
8
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
14
pilot study idiographic item
31
pilot study idiographic item
32
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
47
pilot study idiographic item
48
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
60
pilot study idiographic item
72
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
79
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
Category 6 - HEALTH (concrete)
16
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
34
pilot study idiographic item
39
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
44
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
53
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
61
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
65
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
68
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
80
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
87
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
134
Category 7 - SAFETY (concrete)
2
pilot study idiographic item
35
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
40
GASC (Sarason et al., 1960)
49
pilot study idiographic item
51
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
54
pilot study idiographic item
57
pilot study idiographic item
74
GASC (Sarason et al., 1960)
83
pilot study idiographic item
85
pilot study idiographic item
Category 8 - ANIMALS (concrete)
3
CFSS (Ryall & Dietiker, 1979)
6
pilot study idiographic item
15
FSSFC (Scherer and Nakamura, 1968)
18
pilot study idiographic item
33
pilot study idiographic item
42
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
50
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
70
FSSFC (Scherer & Nakamura, 1968)
80
LFS (Miller et al., 1972)
90
pilot study idiographic item
135
Category 9 - LIE
All of the Lie Scale ite.s are taken fro. the GASC (Sarason et al.. 1960)
and are contextually similar to the 80 regaining fear ite.s.
Question
136
Texas lech University
O a i M i M M M Ol PlyctHl4uf r
7 Occobar b3
Ou*r
PArttnca:
I *m currently wurkin<j on ay Ph.U. OiSM«rt«tion in Clinical Child Psychology
•t Texatt Tach University. After discussing ay research with your principal,
I have bean allowed permiaaion to contact you about your participation In
•y study. Other parochial achools m the GaIveaton/Houston area and in the
West Texas region are already cooperating in ay work.
Within tlie past few yeara. there has been an increase in the nuai>er of children
that school officials, physicians, and psychologists have seen because of
•any fears and wories. Hight now we do not know what to consider "noraidi"
in either the aiauunt or type of fears of young children. TIIIM IS why 1
•a doing wy research on children's fears and worieu. I hope to aid concerned
adults in deciding the severity of a child's fears and if help is needed.
In order to do this, I need to gather information from norakal youngsters.
I have enclosed a consent fora for you to read and sign if you and your
child can help ae. Once It is signed, please return it to your child's
teacher the next day. Soon thereafter, yuur child will be coiapleting two
questionnaires in his/her classrooa. your child will bring huae a packet
of three aiailar questionnaires for you to coaplute and return to lae in
Lubbuck via a pre-paid, self-addressed envelope. All answers will be given
a nxmbttc for your family so that no identifying inforaat Ion will be used.
Once the foras have been Q U I led to ae you may wish to discuss the geneial
questions with your chiId, to learn aore about each other. Many tines parents
are not aware of all of their child's thoughts and this discussion aay be
beneficial. Please reaasure your child that ALL adults and children worry
about things.
If you have any questions please feel free to contact ae in Lubbock at
(HOb) 742-373b or Klixabath Sledden, Texas Tech University, Oepartaent of
Psychology, Box 4100, Lubbock, TX 79409.
I thank you for your valuable tiae ana interest in ay work.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Sledden, B.A.
Graduate Student
ttu 4)00/iubteci. I»«t ;»«iw/|«»t t*lVV
137
Subject Nuaber
CONSENT FORM
I hereby give ay coiisenc for ay purtlc Iputloa or ay chUU's partJLluailon
1« the project entitled: Children's Fears and Worries.
I understand that the people responsible for this project are Ms. Elizabeth
Sledden and Or Bill U c k e , both of whua have agreed to answer any of ay
questions about the procedures. 1 aay reach Ms. Sledden or Dr. Locke In
Lubbock, Texas at (806)742-3736. I also understand that I may contact the
Texas Tech University Instliutlun.il H..vl^wi Hoard for Cho Protect lun uf
Human Subjects at the following address:
Office of 'Research Sciences.
Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas 79A09, or by calling (806)7<,2-5279.
I understand that all information concerning this experlaent will be coded
and that ay oame or Identifying laforwitlon will not be used to Indicate ay
participation la the study.
1 understand that I aay not derive therapeutic treatment froa participating
In this study and that I aay discontinue ay participation at any time.
The experimenter has explained the procedures to be followed and described
the possible risks and stresses. The procedure lai I will be asked to complete three questionnaires and ay child will also be asked to coaplete two
questloooalres.
NOTE: If this research project causes any physical Injurty to the participants of this projact, treataent Is not necessarily available at
Texas Tech University or the Student Health Center, nor la there necessarily any insurance carried by the University or its personnel applicable
to cover any such Injury. Finanaclal coapensatlon for any such injury
must be provided through the participant's uwu Insurance program. Further
Inforaailun about theae matters may be obtained from Dr. J. Knux Jones, Jr.,
Vice President for Hesearch and Graduate STudles, (806)742-2153, Rooa IIB,
Administration Building. Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
79409.
Signatura of Subject
Date
Signature of Project Director or Authorized Representative:
'^*te_
Signature of Witness to Oral Presentation:
Date
Child's Naae(PLEASE PRINT)
Number of Parents Willing to Complete t'orotiii.
138
Subject Nuaber
DEMOQRAPHIC INPORMTION
Child's Date of Birth
Child's Education (Coapleted)
Child's Current Grade Plaoeaent
Mother's Education (Coapleted)
Mother's Occupation
.^_____^__
Father's Education (Coapleted)
Father's Occupation
•••• NOTEi
_______^
All of the above InforMtlon Is kept confidential, you
are Identified only by your subject nuaber. . . this will keep
your responses together with those of your child.
139
These questions are about what YOUR CHILD thinks and the
things YOUR CHILD worries about.
wrong answers.
There are no right or
All children and adults worry about things.
No one Twill see your answers and connect them with you the subject number is used to keep your responses together
with those of your child.
Circle no or yea for each question as you think it applies
to your child.
If ycu circled yes, then please go on and
circle one of the numbers from 1 to 5 indicating how much
your child worries about that thing.
Please circle "mother" or "father" on the top of the form.
Please do not discuss your answers with your child or your
spouse until all of the forms are completed and in the mail
to me.
Once this is completed, you may wish to discuss the
general questionnaire items with your child, to learn more
about each other.
Many times, parents are not aware of all
their child's thoughts and such a discussion may be helpful.
Please reassure your child that what is written on the cover
sheet is truei
ALL CHILDREN AND £V£N ADULTS WURRY ABOUT
THINGS.
Tluiiik you fur your tlmo iiinl of fort. I wuy bo rouclioil .iti
Elizabeth A. Sledden
Texas Tech University
Psychology Department
Box 4100
Lubbock, TX
79W*
(806) 742-3736
140
uiHi.i.£ UHL:
Father
Subjeet Nuaber
ru-ent's Queatlcna
ft:
1.
1
No
Is your cblia- aver afraid of deep watart
Yea
1
]
3
2.
No
la your child aver afraid of being l a f t alone?
alone?
Taa
1
2
)
••"•••I
3.
Mo
Is your child aver afraid of bucs?
tea
1
2
3
k.
No
k
uai
k
i
k
i
l»
5
2s:: ^SiJigS?"* ""• '"^ **•* •**•*•• *• •»•* ""• "»• - v w . b -
5.
No
6.
No
7.
S.
No
t t l n g h^alte eonta to do?
Toe
1
2
3
!• your cbUd over afraid of eeckroachaa?
las
I
Z
J
Ooao your c h i l d a v o r worry?
»••
1
2
1
*
5
k
Ooaa your child avar worry about being In an oarthquaka?
»oe
I
2
3
k
i
9.
Ho
10.
No
tee
I
2
3
k.
,
5
la your ehlld avor afraid of the davll?
Tea
I
2
3
k
U . Nhan your Ghlld aaa yoynaar, waa ha/aha aver ocarad of anything?
No
tea
I
12. Ooaa your cblld over worry about not doing bla/har boaaworkt
No
Xaa
5
1 3 . Oooa your ohild avar worry about you getting a divorooT
No
Yea
U . Ooaa y o u r c b l l d %yi*r worry a b o u t b e i n g In a hurrloanoT
No
Yaa
1
2
3
%
r
»5.
No
16.
•No
la your cblld over afraid of anakaaT
Yaa
1
2
3
k
5
5
i
la your child over afraid of the a U h t of blood?
Yea
1
2
3 ^
^
No
la It avar hard for your child to keep higher alitd on higher
achooiwerk?
Yaa
1
2
3
%
3
18.
No
layour eblld avar afraid of iungla animals (tigers, liana)?
Yaa
1
23
<»
5
19.
No
la your oblld avor afraid of haunted houaao?
Yaa
1
23
k
20.
No
Doaa your child avor worry about gheata or apooky thlngo?
tea
1
2
3
k
i
21.
No
Doaa y o u r c h i l d a v a r worry about hew w e l l h « / a h a Is d o i n g In a c h o o l ?
Yaa
I
2
3
H
5
22.
No
Ooaa your c h i l d a v e r worry about t h e way h « / a h a draasaa or a o t a ?
Too
1
23
k
i
17.
i
Mother
141
(ill
xai
23.
Me
2<i.
Ooaa your child aver marry about not being aucoaaaful in U f a ?
tea
I
2
3
H
)
Maa anyone avar bean able ta oeara your child?
Na
2$.
Mb
26.
No
27.
No
Yaa
uJlilA
1
4J^
23
b
Ooaa your oblld over worry about death or dead people?
Yea
1
23
b
Ooaa your c h i l d avar worry about going to b a l l ?
Yaa
I
23
b
i
5
Is your e b i l d avar a f r a i d of hawing nlghtaaraaT
Yes
I
23
b
)
2B.
No
Ooaa your c h i l d avar worry about the and of the world?
Yaa
I
2
3
<>
29.
Ooaa your child avor worry about paaslng a grade?
No
5
Yaa
t
2
3
b
i
)
30.
No
Ooaa your ahlld over worry about not knowing bi^har boaawork?
Vos
1
2
3
b
5
31.
Ooaa your child over worry about being In a tornado?
No
32.
Mb
Yaa
t
2
3
k
i
Ooaa your child over worry about balna In a storm?
Vaa
1
2
3
«
S
33.
Mo
3b.
Mo
3S.
Ho
3i.
Mo
la your oblld ever afraid of aata?
Yaa
1
2
3
^
5
Ooaa your oblld over worry about getting a dlaaaaa?
Yea
I
2
3
^
)
Ooaa your oblld over worry about balnc kidnapped?
lea
1
2
3
«^
5
Ooaa your ahlld avar worry about giving the arang anawar in olaaa?
Yea
1
2
3•
*
5
37.
Ma
Ooaa your child avar worry about atkat la going to happen?
Yaa
1
2
3
«
5
36.
Ma
Ooaa your child over worry about plaaalng the taaohar?
Yaa
I
2
3
b
i
Do«e your child avar worry about having to go to the heopital?
Yea
t
2
3
b
5
39.
Ma
bO.
M«
Ooaa your c h i l d avar worry that bVd*>« night gat hurt In a car
•ccldentT
Yaa
1
2
3
b
i
<•!.
»•
Ooaa your child avar feel that ba/aha meat ba the boat In avarytblng?
Yaa
I
2
3
b
5
%2.
la your oblld over a f r a i d af apldara?
Mo
Yaa
1
2
3
b
}
<i3. Ooao your ohild over worry about wbat other people think of biVbar?
Ma
Yaa
I
2
3
b
>
bb.
Mo
'»i,
No
1^.
No
la your child avar afraid of having an operation?
Yaa
1
2
3
b
i
la your child avar unhappyt
Yea
I
2
3
b
}
Ooaa your child avar faal that aoaaono will tall hWlker that
ha/aha doaa thinga iha wrong way?
Yea
I
2
3
b
i
b7.
No
Ooaa your child avar worry about getting poioon Ivy or polaon oak?
Yaa
I
2
}
b
)
142
Ba. Xu
bO.
Mo
UJdUa
Ooaa your ahlld avar worry about g e t t i n g a l a o t r l e a l aback?
Yaa
I
2
3
b
S
b9. Ooaa your chUd over worry about g e t t i n g robbed?
Mo
Yas
I
2
3
b
iO. la your child over afraid of rata or alee?
Mo
Yea
1
2
3
b
SI. Ooaa your child avar worry about g o t t l M loot?
Mo
Yea
t
2
3
b
)2.
Mo
i Lot
5
$
$
Ooao yaur ohild avar worry about what you w i l l aay to hiVbart
Yaa
1
2
3
b
i
S3.
Ma
ik.
Mo
55.
Mb
56.
Me
57.
Mo
SS.
Mo
59.
Mo
60.
Mo
6t.
Mo
A2.
Ho
63.
He
6b.
No
^S.
No
66.
No
Ooao your child avar worry about garaa or g e t t i n g a aarloua lllnaaa?
Yaa
1
2 3
b
)
Ooao your ohild over worry about getting In a fight?
Yaa
1
2 3
b
)
Ooaa your ohild avar worry about being away froa you?
Yaa
1
2 3
b
i
Ooaa your child avar worry about aaking frlenda?
Yea
I
2 3
b
3
la your oblld avar afraid that ha/ahe will die young?
Yea
1
2
3
b
J
Ooaa T^HT ehlld avar worry about falling a teetT
Yea
t
2 3
b
S
la your oblld avar afraid of opaea craaturao?
Yaa
1
2
3
b
5
Ooaa your child over worry about being in a flood?
Yaa
t
2
3
b
S
Doaa your child over worry about jotting out or hurt?
Yea
1
2 3
b
S
Nao your child avar been aftaid of getting hurt?
Yes
1
2
3
b
5
Ooaa ](aur child avar worry about aeaaona in the faaily getting hurt?
Yaa
I
2
3
•»
5
Oo aoae of the etorloa In the aoviaa or on TV acar* your ohild?
Yea
1
2
3
b
i
Ooaa your child avar worry about not being able to breathe?
Yea
I
2 3
b
i
Ooaa your child'a feelInge avar gat hurt aaally whan acoldad?
Yae
1
2
3
b
)
67.
No
Oeea your ehlld avar get scared whan ha/aha baa to go in a dark rooa?
Yea
1
2
3
b
5
68.
No
la your child «vor afraid of getting a ahot?
Yea
1
2 3
b
69.
No
Ooao your child over worry about frlenda not l i k i n g h i g h e r ?
Yaa
I
2
3
b
S
70.
No
Is your cblld ever afraid of atranga or aaan-looklng doga?
Yaa
1
2
3
b
5
71.
Mo
la your child avar afraid of being laughed at?
Yea
t
2
3
k
i
i
143
Ua
111
k i.UiU
4_l^
72. boaa your ohild avar worry about lightnlnd?
Ho
Yaa
I
2
3
b
S
73. la yaur ahlld avar afraid af aaaaUing hiding ««idor Ue bad?
No
Yaa
I
2
3
b
5
7b.
Ho
75.
la your oblld ever frightened when looking down froa a high place?
Yas
1
23
b
J
la your cMU* aver afcmld whan ba/abo baa ta apeak In olaaa?
76.
Mo
Ooaa your c h i l d avar worry about being e a U e d on by the teacher?
Yaa
1
2
3
b
5
77.
No
Ooaa yaur o b l l d avar worry about wbat could happen to you?
Yea
I
23
b
J
78.
Mo
Doaa your c h i l d avor worry about having ta atay a f t e r achool?
Yea
I
23
b
i
MO
Yaa
1.
2
3
k
J
7 9 . Ooao your a h l l d avar worry about being In a f i r e ?
Mo
Yas
1
2 3
b
S
80. la your oblld avar afraid of dootoro?
Mo
Yea
1
2 3
b
S
81. lo your oblld over afraid thet you will die?
Mo
Yea
t
23
b
i
8 2 . Ooaa yaur c h i l d avar warry about aoaething bad happening ta
aoaaoiM b«/abo baa—?
Mo
Yea
1
23
b
5
83.
Mo
la your oblld over afraid of atranga or aaan^laoklng people?
Yea
t
2
3
'
b
' '^i
8b.
No
as.
Na
66.
Na
87.
No
la your ohild over afraid at the dark?
Yea
t
2
3
b
3
Doaa your child •vr worry about being abet (by a gun)?
Yea
1
2
3 ,
b
3
Ooea your c h i l d e v e r worry abon ha/oho goaa to bed at night?
Yea
1
2
3
^
5
le your ohild ever afraid »t having aat«i poiaonad food?
Yes
1
23
b
3
8 8 . Maa your child ever bad a aaary draaa?
He
Yes
1
23
b
3
89. la your child over afraid of froga?
No
Yaa
1
23
b
3
90. la your cblld over afraid of abarfca or anlaala in the aaa?
Mo
Yaa
1
2
3
b
3
91.
Na
92.
Hhat
No
93.
Hhat
No
9*».
la your child avar afraid of oaaatarlea (gravayarda)?
Yea
1
23
b
3
la there anything alaa your oblld la afraid of7
la it?
Yes
i
I
5
S
5
la there anything alee that your child worriae about?
la it?
Yea
I
I
3
S
3
U there anythif« elaat « _ _ _ . ^ _ ^ _ ^ _ ^ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
144
OtVELOPMNTkL HUTONY
Hava any af tha following avar happsnad to your child?
Indicate boo aany tUaa you can recall thia happening.
Igl
1. bean In deep watar and
not awlamlng wall.
2. Bean laft alana.
tlA
MyabT 9/ Tl^.a
__ ____ _ _ ^ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_^
_^
^_____^___^__
3. Been atung by a bug.
_^
b. iaan tald that athere did
not i U e the way bV«Ma did
•oaetbing.
^_
______^__
___
3. Had ta bill a oaakroaab.
6. been In an earthquake.
7. Not had thinga ga the rigbt
way for biVber.
8. bean tola about how bad it
Piaaaa
__ ___ _________
___ __ __^_^^______
__
__
___________
9. Hot dana hoaawark.
___
___
^__^^__^__
10. Paranta dlvoreing.
___
__
..^_______
would ba ta neat the devil.
11. bean In a hurrioana.
__
12. lean bitten by a anaba.
13. U e t a lot af blood.
lb. Not been able to pay
attention to oabooloork.
13. Hat and/or touched a wild
aniaal (tlaar. lion, ate.).
|6.
^_
_____^^^___
__
_________
__ ,^_ ________^_
__ __ _________
Been In a haunted bouaa.
__ __
_^^___^_
17. Mean tald apaoky atoriad
o r ghoet atarles.
__
__
___^__^___
18.
__
__
_________
19. Mean told b^aba dreaaad or
aetod fUmy.
__
__
_______.^_
Hot done well In sebool.
20. Boon told ba/abe would
not be aueooaaful In U f a .
21. Nad a faaily aaaber or
d o a a friend die.
22. Bean tald about boa awful
It would ba In ball.
33. Mad nlgbtaarao.
2b. Been told about the and
of tha world.
23. Hat paaaad a grade.
26. Been In a tornado.
27. Been In a atora.
28. Bean hurt by a cat.
1^
XlB
Ba.
__
___
31• Olvan a wrong anawar in
'^••'*
__
^_
32. Hot pleaded the taaohar.
__
__
33. Gone ta Uo boapital.
__
„_
y».
__
__
33. boon bitten by a apidar.
__
_
36. Nad an oparation.
.^
__^
37. Bean told ba/abe did tbU\ga
the wrong way.
__
__
__
__
29. Gotten a aarloua diaeaae.
30. Been kidnapped.
38.
Bean hurt in a car accident.
Gotten poioon ivy or
poioon oak.
39. Gotten ahockad by electricity
bO.
Bean robbed.
bl.
Bean hurt by a rat/aouae.
b2.
Bean l a a t .
b3.
Bean a r i t i o i i a d b y paranto.
bb.
Mot aada friande a a a l l y .
b3.
Nad a friand die young.
b«.
PaUad a t a e t .
___
,___
__
__
b7. Saan a mavli
craaturao.
bS.
Been in a flood.
__
b9. Been cut or hurt.
__
30. Pbally aaaber hurt.
__
31. Seen aeary aoviaa or TV.
__
32. Hat boon able ta breathe.
33. felt bad when aooldad.
S**. Cone into a dark, aoary
33. Cotton e obot.
36. Upaat hla/hor friends.
37. Bean hurt by a dog.
3S.
Been laughed at.
39. Bean outalda wbila It was
lightning.
60. Had soaetbing bide under
the bod.
_
__
Nuabar ol T l —
14
Xaa B a . •"•"•'• "' X'"*'
6|,
Bean in a high plaae.
__
__
.^_____^_
62.
Had td apeak la olabb.
_^
__
____^___
8}.
loan Obllad on by tb« tadcbaf
__
______^__
6b.
Mad aaMtblng bad happen ta
__
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
pnranta.
__
63. Mad t« atay after sabMi.
__
66. Been in a fire.
__
__
^_^______^
67. Bean ta a dactar.
__
^__
,^__________
68. Had one parent die.
__ __
69. Bean appraaabad by a
btnngar.
TO. Bean alana In Ua dark.
71. Been abet by • <un.
72. Horriad in bad.
__
__ __
__
__
73. latan bad or peiaonad faod.
__
7b. Been hurt tg a frog..
__
^__
73. Been hurt by a aaa aniaal.
__
__
76. Been 1« a oeaetory( graveyard)__ __
77. Not been the beat In
everything.
78.
Gotten a aarloua lllnaaa.
79.
Been Ui a figbt.
__
__
__ __
80. Been aeparatad hroa paranta. __
__
147
These questions are about what YOU think and the things
YOU worry about.
There are no right or wrong answers.
We all worry about things.
No one will find out your
answers -> there are no names on these questions.
Circle no or yes for each question.
If you say yea, then
circle one of the numbers to say how much you worry about
that thing.
If you have any questions while you are doing this,
please ask.
148
Subject Nuaber
Cbiid'd Ouoatlena
K
to
2
"^-^
3
aa&
b
I. Are you ewer afraid af deep watar?
Mo Yaa
I
S
3
If being loft alane?
3
«
Yea
3. Are you ever afraid af huge?
Ma «ee
t
2
b
b
b. Oa you over feel that atbara de net like the way you do thinga?
Me Yee
1
2
3
b
3. Oa you owor warry that you won't bo able ta da aeaeUing
want ta daf
Ma Yea
I
2
3
b
6. are you ewer afraid »t eoekroaabaof
Ha
7.
Ha
Yaa
t
8
3
b
Oo yau avar warryl
lab
I
2
3
b
8. Pa yau aver warry about being In an aartbauaka?
Ma
tab
t
2
3
b
9. Be yaa avar gat warrlad wban tblnga da net ga the rUht way for youT
He lea
1
2
3
b
10. Are y
Ha taa
11. bhan yau ware youngs
Ho Yes
t
rUing?
1 2 . Oo yau avar warry about n a t doing your baaeoork?
Ha l e a
1
2
3 .
b
13. be you avar worry about yaur paranta getting a divarca?
Ma lea
1
2
3
^
tb. Oa yau avar warry about beli^ la a hurrioana?
Ho lea
t
*
3
*>
15. Are yau avor a f r a i d of eaafcae?
He Tea
1
>
3
<>
16. are you ever afraid 9t the eight of blood?
Ha
taa
t
>
3
*
17.
Mb
la it ever hard far yau ta beep your aind on your achao warfc?
lee
1
2
3
*•
18. are you ever afraid af Jungle anlaala (tlgara. liana)?
Ma
lea
I
2
3
^
19. Are you over afraid af haunted baueae?
He
Yae
i
2
3
20.
Ha
21.
He
*
Oo yau avar warry about gheata or spooky U l n g a ?
taa
i
2
3
*>
Oo you e v e r warry abaut saw wall you are delng In acbae
Yaa
I
2
3
"
22. Oo you avar worry about the way you draaa ar act?
Ha Ita
t
2
3
*•
23. Oo you ever worry about not being auccaaafut in Ufa?
Ha Yaa
1
2
3
"
Copyright 1986 Elizabeth Sledden Oybell
149
B8
lag
Alot
A Little
2b. Has anyano avar been able to soara yau?
Ha
Yaa
1
2
3
<»
23. Oo you avar warry about death or dead people?
Ho
Yea
1.
2
3
b
26.
HO
De you ever worry abaut going to hell?
Yea
I
2 • ' 3
27. Are you over afraid af having nlgbtaaraa?
Ha
taa
1
2
3
28.
He
*
^
Do you ever worry abaut the end of the world?
too
i
2
3
^
29. Do you avor worry about not paaaing a grade?
Ho Yee
1
2
3
b
ya.
Ho
Oo you ever worry about not knowing your boaawerk?
Yee
i
2
3
b
31. Oo you ever worry about being in a tornado?
Mo Yeo
1
2
3
<>
)2. Do you ever worry about being in a atorw?
Mo
Voo
1
2
3
33. Are you aver afraid of eats?
Ho
Yea
1
2
3
*>
>*
No
Do you ever worry about getting a dloaaaa?
Yaa
I
2
3
«
35.
Ma
Oo you ever worry about being kidnapped?
Yes
i
2
3 '
*»
36.
No
Do you avar worry about giving the wrong anawar in olaaa?
Yaa
1
2
3
b
'
37.
Mo
Do you aver worry about wbat la going to happen?
Yea
1
2
3
b
38.
Mb
Do you ever worry about pleasing your taaobart
Yaa
1
2
1
b
39.
Mo
Oo you avar worry about having to go to the hoapitalT
Yaa
1
2
3
*>
bO.
No
Oo you avar worry that you night gat hurt in a ear aoe
Yaa
i
2
3
^
<•!.
He
Do you over feel that yau have to be the boot in everything?
Yea
ant?
I
No
Are you ever afraid af apldara?
Yea
1
2
3
b3.
No
Do you over worry about what ether people think of you?
Yea
1
2
3
•
bb.
Na
Are you avar afraid af having an operation?
Yaa
I
2
3
^
bs.
No
b6.
Are you ever unhappy?
.
Yaa
I
2
3
*•
Do you avar faoi that aoaaono will tall you that you da thinga
the wrong way?
.
Yaa
1
2
3
«
No
150
BA
11'
Nb
laa
LJJiiia
ilai
S* '•^ •**r •*^'» • ^ ^ I aettlng polaon ivy or polaon oak?
taa
I
2
3
b
3
bB.
He
b9.
No
SO.
Ma
Si.
Ho
32,
Ha
Do you over worry about olootrlaal ahook?
Yeo
I .
2
3
b
Oo you ever worry abaut getting robbed?
Yea
I
2
3
b
Ara you ever aft-aid af rata ar alee?
tea
1
2 3
b
Do you ever worry about getting loatT
tea
1
2
3
b
De you ever worry about wbat your paranta will aay to
Yae
I
2
3
b
3
3
3
3
you?
3
S3. Oo you ever worry about ger«a or getting a aarloua lllnaaa?
Ha Yea
I
S
3
b
3
Sb.
Oo you over worry about getting in a fight?
He
Yaa
55.
Ho
56.
Ho
37.
Ho
58.
Ho
59.
Mo
60.
No
61.
No
62.
Ha
63.
Ho
Do you ever worry about being away from your paranta?
Yeo
I
2 3
b
3
De you aver worry about aaking friande?
Yeo
I
2 3
b
3
Ara you ever afraid that you will die yoeng?
tea
I
2 3
b
3
Do you ever worry about falling a taet?
Yea
1
2
3 .
b
3
Are you aver afraid of apaoa oraaturea?
Yaa
I
2
3
*»
i
Do you aver worry about being in a flaod?
Yaa
I
2
3
b
3
Oo you avar worry about getting out or hurt?
Yea
I
2
3
<•
i
Have you ever boon afraid of getting hurt?
Yea
1
2
3
*>
i
Oo you over worry about aamaona in your faaily getting hurt?
Yea
I
2 3
'>
i
1
2
3
b
3
6b. De aoae of the atorloa in tha navies or on TV ocara you?
Ho
Yaa
I
2 3
**
i
65. Do you aver worry about not being able to breathe?
Ho Yea
I
2
3
*>
>
66. Oo yaur faoilnga ever fot hurt aaally when you ar* sdoldadt
Ha Yaa
t
I
3
••
>
67.
Ha
68.
NO
69.
No
Oo yau aver get eoarod when you hava ta ga Inla a dark
Yaa
I
2
3
*•
Ara you e.ar afraid at getting a abet?
Yaa
1
2
3
•»
Oo you ever worry about your friande nat liking you?
Yaa
i
2
3
*
rooa?
>
i
'
Ga aa 4 L U t U
70. Ar. you ever afraid of atranga or aaan-laoking doga?
He
•
3
b
71. Are you ever afraid of being laughed at?
No
tee
I
2
3
^
72. Oo^you over worry about lightning?
No
73.
No
Are you avar afraid of
tea
1
2
AiQt
thing hiding under your bed?
7b. Are you evar frightened whM< looking dowi froa a high p
ace?
No
75. Are yau ever afraid when you hava «a apeak in elaae?
He
76. Oo^you ever worry'abaut being c a l l e d on by the taaohar?
Ho
77.
Ho
78.
Oo^you evar worry abaut what aould happen to your paranta?
Do you evar worry about having ta atay after oobool?
»••
I
2
3
If
79. Oo you ever worry about being in a fire?
80.
No
tea
I
2 * 3
Are you ever afraid af doetora?
tea
I
2
3
81.
No
Are you ever afY>ald of your paranta dying?
taa
1
2
3
"
b
b
82.
Do yeu avar worry about aoaatbing ba<' happening to ooaeene
you know?
too
I
2
3
b
03. Are you evar afraid of atranga «r aaan-looking people?
tea
I
2
3
b
No
8b. Ara you ever afraid af the dark?
Yaa
i
23
b
you
as. Do
taa
No
86.
No
87.
aver worry about being ahot? (by a gun)
1
2
3
b
Oo you avar worry wban you go to bad at night?
Yaa
I
2
3
b
Are you ever afraid of having eaten polaoned food?
Yea
I
2
]
b
88.
No
Have you ever bad a acary draaa?
Yea
1
23
89. Ara yeu avar afraid »t froge?
No
Yea
1
2
3
b
90.
Mo
Ara you aver afraid of aharka er anlaala in the eea?
b
91.
No
Are you avar afraid of oeaetorlaa (graveyarda)?
Yaa
.. I
2
3
b
92.
la there anything alee you ara afraid of?
Hhat la it? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ^ ^ _ ^ _ _ _ . ^ _ _ _
Y*a
I
1
3
5
No
Yea
1
2
3
93. la there anything alee you worry about?
No
Nhat la it?
Yea
1
9*.
Is there anything aloe? _ _ _ _ ^
T
3
b
Subloat Nuaber
TMUMiS TMAT NAVE MAPPUtkU TO UK
Have any af ihaaa Uln«a happened to you?
baa aany tlaaa yeu think it baa aappenad.
Piaaaa write deem
XAB Ba. BMamr Bf Tista
1. bean In deep water and not
awiaaing wail.
2. bean lart aiama.
).
___ _ _ _ _ ^ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
___ ___ ^ ^ _ ^ _ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Been atung by a bug.
__
___________
__
__
__________
__
___
b. bean tald by atbara that tbay
did not iibo tno aay yeu did
aaaatbii«.
3.
Had ta h i l l a eaakreaob.
4.
aeon t a M oartb^uaba.
7.
Hat bad talAga ga the rigM»
wv far you.
^__^_______
8. Been tald about Ua d«vll.
__
__
_^________
9. Hal dene your beaework.
__
__
______^___
le. I^enta been divorood.
__
___
___________
11. Bean
ta
a
burr
loans.
^_
__
__^_^______
12. Bean bitten by a anaba.
__
__
_________
13. - U a t a let af blood.
___
__
__________
lb. Hal been able ta pay attaatioa
tb your sobaaiaarb.
__
IS. Hat or touchad a wild
__
__^.^__^_
anlMl (tiger. Ilea).
|6.
17.
Been In a haunted bouee.
__
__
__^___^____
bean tald appoky atarlaa
ar gheet otorleo.
18. Hot done well In aabool.
19.
_
Been tald you dreaaad ar aetod
20. Been told you would aot ba
buaaooafwi U life.
2|.
Had a faaily aaaber er
oloae friend die.
22.
Bean told abaut bell.
__
__
__
_
__
bf the aarld.
__
__
3).
Hot paaaaa a grada.
^
__
24.
Bean in a tamada.
__
__
27.
Seen in a atora.
__
2a.
Been hurt by a cat.
__
23. Had nlgbti^as.
2b.
Been tald about the end
__
Copyright 19B6 Elizabeth Sledden Oybell
Xaa Ba. WuaOar of Ttaea
29. Gotten a aarloue dleeaaa.
___
,___
30. Bean kidnapped.
__
___
31. Given a wrong anawar in
claaa.
32.
Not ploaaad tha teacher.
33.
Gone to the b o a p i t a l .
___
___
3b.
Baan hurt in a oar aoeident. ___
___
35.
Been bitten by a apidar.
__
___
36.
Mad an operation.
___
__
37.
Bean told you did thlngo
___
__
the wrong way.
38. Gotten polaon ivy or
poioon oak.
__
39. Oottan ahockad by electricity
___
bO.
Bean robbed.
bl.
Bean hurt by a ra^mouae
__
___
b2.
Baan l o a t .
__
___
b3.
Baan c r l t i o U a d by paranto.
bb.
Not Mda friande a a a l l y .
^_
__
bS.
Had a friend die young.
b6.
Palled a t e a t .
b?.
Saan a movie about apace
craaturaa.
__
__
__
__
___
__
__
___
__
__
___
rooa.
__
__
55. Gotten a ahot.
__
__
56. Upaat your fflenda.
„__
__
57. Baan hurt by a dog.
__
__
b8. Bean In a flood.
b9. Been cut or hurt.
30. Paaily aeaber been hurt.
51. Sean acary aovleo or TV
ahewa.
52. Not boon able to breathe.
53. Felt bad when ecolded.
$b. Cons into a dark, acary
58. Baan laughed at.
59. Baan outside while it waa
lightning.
60. Had aeaethlng hid under
your bed.
___
__
__
Xsa
61,
baan In a high placa.
62.
Had to apeak In claaa.
!!a_
__
6 ] . Bean called on by the taaohar
6b.
Had aoaethlng bad happen to
your paranta.
65.
Had to atay after achool.
66.
Baan In a flra.
67.
Bean to e doctor.
68.
Had a parent die.
69.
Baan followed by a
atrangar.
70.
Baan alone in the dark.
71.
Bean ahot by a gun.
72.
Horriad in bed.
73.
Eatan bad or poleoned food.
7b.
Baan hurt by a frog.
75.
Baan hurt by a aaa aniaal.
76.
Bean in a graveyard.
77. Not baan the beet in
everything.
78. Gotten a aarloue lllneee.
79.
Baan In a fight.
00.
Baan away froa your paranta.
__
__
-
Nuaber of Tleea
155
,S t l , .
Texas Tech University
Oap«(Un«nl ol Ptychotugy
Elizabwth Sledden
242lA 22nd Place
Lubbock, TX
79411
IS tfebruary 1964
A few weeka ego
you to cuaiplete
history. These
my dissertation
your child brouijlit huma a packet of queationnairea for
about your child's fears and his or her developoantal
items ara very ia^Mctant for me to be able to complete
raaaarch.
1 would like to remind you to plttase coaplete these forms and return th«a
to me via Che ataaped, addreeaed envelope that waa sent home with the forma.
If you have misplaced the forms or did not receive them, pleabd concacc
me and I will quickly aupply you with replacements. These forms ehuuld
not take more than 1S-20 minutes for you to coaplete and all information
is kept strictly confidential.
I'lease feel free to contact ue at wurk (742-3737) or at home in tliu eveninqs
(747-SnS) If I need to qive you new forms or if there are any questions
you wiah to ask. 1 am eaqer to receive your information and very grateful
for your time, energy and intereet in my work.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Sledden, B.A.
Graduate Student in Clinical Psychology
Teiuts Tech University
bu«4IUU/luUMM.i. U . M ; M I N / | M » | 74^ Ui?
APPENDIX C
SUPPLEMENTARY DATA TABLES
156
157
Table 17
ANOVA Summary Table of Concrete Fear Frequency
Rural vs. Urban Children
Source
Main Effects
SS
DF
33.202
1
Residual
7596.844
1030
Total
7630.046
1031
4.502
.034
158
Table 18
ANOVA Summary Table of Concrete Fear Intensity:
Rural vs. Urban Children
Source
Main Effects
SS
DF
20.061
1
Resi dual
922.220
1030
Total
942.283
1031
22.406
.001
159
Table 19
ANOVA Summary Table of Abstract Fear Frequency
Rural vs. Urban Children
Source
Main Effects
SS
DF
6.765
46.861
Residual
7134.952
1030
Total
7181.813
1031
.009
160
Table 20
ANOVA Summary of Abstract Fear Intensity
Rural vs. Urban Children
Source
Main Effects
SS
33.282
Resi dual
1132.605
Total
1165.887
DF
30.267
.001
161
Table 21
ANOVA Summary Table of Conrete Fear Frequency
Socio-Economic Groups
Source
Main Effects
SS
DF
46.564
3. 159
Resi dual
7583.482
1029
Total
7630.046
1031
.043
162
Table 22
Correlations Between History of Trauma
and Mean Intensity Scores
Category
Point-Biserial
1 School
.17017
.0031
2 Home
.20321
.0005
3 Social
.09591
.0622
4 Supernatural
.12141
.0257
5 Nature
.14787
.0087
6 Health
.12582
.0217
7 Safety
.17307
.0027'
8 Animals
.13007
.0184
Note. These computations were done using one
data point per category for each child subjects.
The asterisks indicate significant correlations.
163
Table 23
Pairwise Comparison Between Category Mean
Intensity Score for Upper and Lower
Socio-Economic Class
Category
1 School
0.02
987
2 Home
•0.32
749
3 Social
0.29
771
4 Supernatural
•1.51
135
5 Natural
-1.75
083
6 Health
-0.53
595
7 Safety
-0.42
676
8 Animals
-0.69
489
Note. The degrees of freedom for these
comparisons were (1, 88) for a total of 90 subjects
Negative values indicate that the upper group
reported a greater intensity than the lower group.
164
Table 24
Pairwise Comparison Between Category Mean
Intensity Score for Upper and Middle
Socio-Economic Class
Category
1 School
0.55
585
2 Home
0.06
950
3 Social
0 . 18
857
4 Supernatural
•1.32
187
5 Nature
•0.45
656
6 Health
•0.33
745
7
Safety
0.51
610
8
Animals
0.59
554
Note. The degrees of freedom for these comparisons
were (1, 220) for a total of 222 subjects. Negative
values indicate that the upper group reported a
greater intensity than the middle group.
165
Table 25
Pairwise Comparison Between Category Mean Intensity
Score for Middle and Lower Socio-Economic Class
Category
1 School
•0.45
651
2 Home
•0.42
674
3 Social
0.20
843
4 Supernatural
•0.78
435
5 Nature
•1.68
095
6 Health
•0.42
676
7 Safety
•0.95
342
8 Animals
•1.30
196
Note. The degrees of freedom for all of the
comparisons were (1, 202) for a total of 204 subjects.
Negative values indicate that the middle group reported
greater intensity than the lower group.
166
Table 26
Pairwise Comparison Between Category Mean
Intensity Score for Rural and Urban Groups
Category
1 School
2.34
.020
2 Home
3.55
.0001
3 Social
2. 15
.032
4 Supernatural
3.08
.002
5 Nature
3.46
.OOl"
6 Health
2.44
.015""'
7 Safety
1.77
.078
8 Animals
2.13
.034
Note.
The degrees of freedom for these comparisons
were (1, 256) for a total of 258 subjects. The asterisks
indicate a significant result, with the urban group
reporting a greater intensity than the rural group.
167
Table 27
ANOVA Summary Table of Total Number of Fears
Mothers vs. Children
Source
Main Effects
SS
DF
264.074
1
Residual
3031.112
16924
Total
4195.186
16925
1136.877
.001
168
Table 28
ANOVA Summary Table of Total Number of Fears
Fathers vs. Children
Source
Main Effects
SS
DF
428.472
102.543
Residual
2569.128
10735
Total
2671.671
10736
.001
169
Table 29
ANOVA Summary Table of Average Fear Intensity
Mothers vs. Children
Source
Main Effects
SS
DF
3481.99
260.1
Resi dual
45300.983
16920
Total
48782.973
16925
.001
170
Table 30
ANOVA Summary Table of Average Fear Intensity
Fathers vs. Children
Source
Main Effects
SS
DF
204.936
1024.678
Resi dual
27683.937
10731
Total
28708.615
10736
.001
171
Table 31
ANOVA Summary Table of Average Fear Intensity
Male vs. Female Children
Source
SS
Main Effects
8.417
DF
7.762
Resi dual
2515.744
2320
Total
2524.161
2321
.005
172
Table 32
ANOVA Summary Table of Average Fear Intensity
Children's Age Groups
Source
SS
Main Effects
7.271
4
Resi dual
154.522
253
Total
161.793
257
DF
2.976
.02
173
Table 33
Differences Between Mean Intensity Scores by Age Group
Age in Months
1.
78-102 = 2.6170
2. 103-126 = 2.4846
3. 127-150 = 2.3634
4. 151-174 = 2.0595
5. 175-198 = 1.4835
103-126
.1261
127-150
151-174
175-198
2536
.5575
1.1335
1212
.4251
1.0011
3039
.8799
.5760
174
Table 34
ANOVA Summary Table of Concrete Fear Frequency:
vs. Socio-Economic Class vs. Category
Source
Area
Socio-Economic Class
Area-"-Socio-Economic
Error
Category
Area-Category
Socio-Economic Category
Area-"-SES-"-Category
Error
Area
SS
DF
F
p
9.401
1
.484
.4872
34.036
2
.876
.4176
7.610
2
.196
.8222
4894.081
252
304.838
3
36.814
.0001
35.089
3
4.237
.0055
7.686
6
.464
.8351
45.829
6
2.767
.0115
2086.700
756
175
Table 35
ANOVA Summary Table of Concrete Fear Intensity:
vs. Socio-Economic Class vs. Category
Source
Area
Socio-Economic
Class
Ar ea""'Socio-Economic Class
Error
Area
SS
DF
13.809
1
5.433
.0206
1.042
2
.205
.8149
. 133
.8757
.675
640.557 252
Category
0.320
3
21.833
.0001
Area'" Category
1.573
3
1.690
.1678
.754
6
.405
.8758
2.615
6
1.405
.2100
Socio-Economic'"Category
Area^"-SES-"'Category
Error
234.544 756
176
Table 36
ANOVA Summary Table of Abstract Fear Frequency
vs. Socio-Economic Class vs. Category
Source
Area
SS
DF
6.791
1
.395
.5300
Socio-Economic Class
27.993
2
.815
.4438
Area'"'Socio-Economic
77.391
2
2.254
. 1071
Area
Error
4327.159 252
183.721
3
19.462
.0001
Area'"'Category
12.822
3
1.358
.2544
Socio-Economic'"Category
12.907
6
.684
.6629
Area-"-SES'"'Category
20.726
6
1.098
.3619
Category
Error
2378.885 756
177
Table 37
ANOVA Summary Table of Abstract Fear Intensity
vs. Socio-Economic Class vs. Category
Source
SS
Area
DF
19.551
1
6.318
.0126
.266
2
.043
.9579
4.547
2
.735
.4807
779.804
252
12.850
3
10.223
.0001
Area'""Cat egor y
1.511
3
1.202
.3081
Socio-Economic ""'Category
3.403
6
1.354
.2309
Area'-SES'-Category
4.178
6
1.662
.1275
316.761
756
Area
Socio-Economic Class
Area*Socio-Economic
Error
Category
Error