Citation

Boyle CL, Lutzker JR. J. Fam. Violence 2005; 20(2): 55-69.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Judaism, Bel Air, California; Department of Human Development and Family Life, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas; Present address: Division of Violence Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Cont

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s10896-005-3169-4

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Personal safety programs can teach young children knowledge and skills they can utilize to avoid or escape abduction and sexual abuse (Wurtele, 1990). An appropriate escape response will not occur, however, if the child is unable to discriminate an innocuous situation from a potentially abusive one. This study examines the crucial elements involved in training the recognition or discrimination phase in personal safety programs. A multiple probe design across three typically developing children, ages 5-years 7-months through 6-years 7-months, was used to determine whether rules and discrete trial training of discriminations of appropriate and inappropriate touch and situations generalized to puppet role-play scenarios. All participants showed increases in correct responding on generalization role-play probes and maintained these increases over a 3-and 6-week follow-up.