Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Research Article

The Ability of Multi-Type Maltreatment and Poly-Victimization Approaches to Reflect Psychopathological Impairment of Victimization in Spanish Community Adolescents

¹Department of Personality, Assessment and Psychological Treatment, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona, Spain

²Faculty of Psychology, National Autonomous University of Mexico-UNAM, México

*Corresponding Author:

Maria Forns
Universitat de Barcelona, Facultat de Psicologia
Departament de Personalitat
Avaluació i Tractaments Psicològics
Passeig de la Valld’Hebron, 171
Barcelona, 08035, Spain
Tel: 34 93 3305159
E-mail: mforns@ub.edu

Received Date: October 27, 2014; Accepted Date: February 04, 2015; Published Date: February 09, 2015

Citation: Forns M, Kirchner T, Lucio Gómez-Maqueo, E, Landgrave P, Soler L, et al. (2015) The Ability of Multi-Type Maltreatment and Poly-Victimization Approaches to Reflect Psychopathological Impairment of Victimization in Spanish Community Adolescents. J Child Adolesc Behav 3:187. doi:10.4172/2375-4494.1000187

Copyright: © 2015 Forns M, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This paper examined the ability of two different approaches (the multi-type maltreatment approach, and the polyvictimization approach) to reflect the psychopathological aftermath of victimization. It also analyzed gender-related differences in psychopathological symptoms at varying levels of exposure to violence. The study was conducted in 923 Spanish community adolescents (aged from 14 to 18 years; 62.4% girls; 87.4% born in Spain), recruited for screening purposes from eight secondary schools in Barcelona and its metropolitan area (Spain). The study was based on cross-sectional data. The Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire and the Youth Self Report (DSM scales) were used to analyze victimization and psychopathological impairment respectively. The results showed that the two approaches present a similar ability to reflect psychopathological outcomes. The use of mean T scores to analyze psychopathological impairments conceals the high percentages of adolescents who are at risk in several psychopathological scales. Gender-related differences, analyzed under the multi-type approach, showed that girls presented slightly higher levels of symptomatology in reaction to their first experiences of victimization, whereas boys presented strong emotional reactions after the accumulation of a high number of victimized areas. Adolescents victimized in up to three areas showed evidence of resiliency to interpersonal victimization events and displayed non-clinical psychopathological profiles. Obsessive-compulsive symptoms had to be considered in high victimized groups, conjointly with affective, somatic and post-traumatic stress as psychopathological symptoms related to victimization.

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