This study was super interesting! It is very cool that you created your own questions to include in the questionnaire as well. I would be interested in looking at the different types and severity levels of corporal punishment and see if that would yield any significant findings.

Nice job! I know that an issue my students have run into in the past is that students at UMW tend to have pretty caring and involved parents. While this is good news from our students, it makes it hard to measure the results of poor parenting. Did you get a sense of how much corporal punishment your subjects received, compared to the population as a whole?

One thing we know from operant studies in nonhuman animals is that punishment only tends to affect the overt behavior upon which it is contingent so long as the contingencies remain in place. This isn’t that special and doesn’t mean that punishment is ineffective, as easing other forms of contingencies (e.g., positive reinforcement) will also have the effect of relaxing behavioral control. Would you care to speculate on whether one might find that academic performance is a function of whether a student still lives with the parents that employed corporal punishment procedures?

I thought your study was very interesting! Do you think that the results may have been influenced by the majority female demographic? I wonder if there may be some gender bias in who experiences corporal punishment during childhood. It may be possible that boys are more likely to experience corporal punishment than girls (due to gender socialization).

Good job!