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Psychological maltreatment is one of the main and potentially more destructive forms of child maltreatment. It is difficult to identify, assess and treat. Compared to other forms of child maltreatment such as sexual abuse, physical abuse and neglect, attention received from researchers, child protection service managers and practitioners has been scarce. A review of available knowledge about psychological maltreatment reveals challenges to define the concept in ways useful to policy makers and practitioners. This paper presents a review of definitions of child psychological maltreatment and several measures available for assessing its severity. The review has been used in the Comunidad Autónoma Vasca (Spain) to develop more specific criteria for the identification and severity assessment of child psychological maltreatment in Spanish children services. This paper develops these criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jobs in the General Public Administration of the Basque Country were analyzed on the occasion of functional analysis implementation (Gorriti, 2003; Office for the Modernization of the Public Administration, 1998). As a step in the job analysis process, a number of interviews were carried out to analyze the representative tasks in each job. The interviews yielded 1,410 cognitive skill descriptors and 1,344 social skill descriptors. Based on semantic similarity criteria, five human resources experts reduced the number of descriptors to 94 and 65 respectively, without losing any meaning. This paper checks the semantic consistency of these latter descriptors according to the Content Validity Ratio (CVS) (Lawshe, 1975). Data analysis identified which descriptors to keep and which of them needed to be modified or rejected. As a result of this second analysis, 30 cognitive skill descriptors and 26 social skill descriptors were left. These final descriptors will be the base for further studies in an attempt to identify a factor structure and develop a taxonomy of mental skills on one side and social skills on the other side concerning the employees of the General Public Administration of the Basque Country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]