The Roles of Child Abuse and Insecure Attachment, Through Mediation of Cognitive Process, in Explaining Conduct Disorder in Adolescents

Abstract

Building on ideas developed in the quantitative approach, this paper aims to explore the roles of child abuse and insecure attachment, through the mediation of cognitive process, in explaining conduct disorder in adolescents. By using the multi- stage cluster sampling, 300 girl students ages 12-15 years, who were studying in secondary schools in Ghorveh city during the education year of 2020- 21 were selected randomly to fill six scales including Achenbach’s behavioral problems Youth Self- Report scale, Child Abuse Self-Reporting Scale, Revised Adult Attachment Scale of Collins and Reads, Deep Information Processing, Wechsler Memory Scale for Children, and Stroop Color-Word Test. According to the findings which ware achieved by employing correlational method and structural equation model, three independent variables including child abuse, insecure attachment, and cognitive process directly impacted on forming conduct disorder as the dependent variable. Moreover, child abuse and insecure attachment predicted conduct disorder through the mediation of cognitive process (as a mediational variable). Research findings indicated that the model was fitted properly and thus the experts of health, psychology, and education can use the findings in considering clinical problems and also in arranging preventive and educative plans.

Keywords

• child abuse
• cognitive process
• conduct disorder
• insecure attachment