International Delphi study of specialist practitioner and expert parents views: Child-parent violence initiated by children aged under 12

Abstract

The purpose of this present study was to examine current consensus regarding understandings and perceptions of practice in relation to child-parent violence when the behaviour is initiated in pre-adolescent children. This is a component of a larger piece of doctoral research exploring child-parent violence in pre-adolescents which – for the purpose of this study – is regarding children aged 11 and under. The following research was developed in collaboration with 34 parent co-researchers: parents of pre-adolescent children initiating child-parent violence. These parent co-researchers will henceforth be referred to as co-researchers. A three-stage Delphi procedure was utilised to survey the views of 47 experts in the phenomenon. For this study experts included specialist practitioners working in the field of child-parent violence, parent/caregivers with lived experience of the phenomenon, and those who identify with both criteria. Experts were first asked to respond to a number of open-ended questions which addressed two broad areas: theory and practice, and values and principles. Subsequently, initial responses were grouped into a list of statements. For the following two rounds of questions, experts were asked to quantify their levels of agreement or disagreement to these statements which had emerged from the first stage of the exercise. This report provides an initial summary of the main findings from the Delphi survey.