Elizabeth Gershoff

Who they are

Gershoff's affiliation is given on the 2016 paper as the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Texas at Austin.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Spanking and child outcomes: old controversies and new meta-analyses (2016), with Grogan-Kaylor. The authors pooled 75 studies, 111 effect sizes and 160,927 children, defining spanking as hitting a child on the buttocks or extremities with an open hand. Thirteen of the 17 averaged effect sizes differed reliably from zero, and all of them linked spanking to a greater risk of detrimental outcomes, among them aggression, antisocial behaviour and mental health problems. No outcome showed a reliable pooled benefit. On immediate defiance, the measure closest to compliance in the moment, the effect could not be distinguished from zero. In the seven studies that measured both spanking and physical abuse, both were linked to harm in the same direction, with spanking's effect somewhat smaller, and effect sizes did not differ much by study design.

Key ideas

The paper addresses two objections often raised in defence of spanking: that its effects are really those of abuse, and that they disappear in stronger study designs. The authors report that neither held in their data. They are also clear about the limits. Spanking cannot ethically be assigned at random, so the evidence is observational, the pooled comparisons are unadjusted, and longitudinal links do not rule out the possibility that a child's behaviour draws more spanking. Robert Larzelere and Brett Kuhn's 2005 meta-analysis reached a more qualified conclusion, finding that what they called conditional spanking compared favourably with most alternative tactics.

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