Larzelere (in press) built on their review by extending the search of peer-reviewed articles to the period 1974 to 1995 plus older articles that met the inclusion criteria. The inclusion criteria were designed to exclude studies that were cross-sectional or whose measures emphasized the severity of usage of corporal punishment. Only 18 studies were found that both met the two inclusion criteria and limited the sample to children under 13 years of age. The 8 strongest studies found beneficial outcomes of corporal punishment, usually in 2- to 6-year-olds. The 10 other studies were prospective (6) or retrospective (4). Three of them found detrimental outcomes, but only 1 of those 3 made any attempt to exclude abuse from its measure of corporal punishment. Further, none of the 10 studies controlled for the initial level of child misbehavior. This seems to be an important methodological problem, since the frequency of every type of discipline response tends to be positively associated with child misbehavior, whether the associations are cross-sectional or longitudinal (Larzelere, Sather, Schneider, Larson, & Pike, 1996; Larzelere, Schneider, Larson, & Pike, in press). Finally, no alternative discipline response in any of the 18 studies was associated with more beneficial child outcomes than was corporal punishment, whereas 7 alternatives were associated with more detrimental child outcomes, mostly in 2- to 6-year-olds.
These reviews suggest that the empirical linkage between nonabusive corporal punishment and aggression comes only from cross-sectional studies, studies of teenagers, studies measuring particularly severe forms of corporal punishment, and, perhaps, studies of punitiveness. This led us to ask how well current societal experiments are working in countries that have outlawed all forms of parental use of corporal punishment.
