Child abuse report. Licensed therapists are mandated by law to report child abuse by their clients. This law requires the therapist to breach confidentiality and possibly lose the client’s trust. A national survey of licensed psychotherapists was conducted to investigate clients’ reactions to legally mandated child-abuse reports

(American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Jan. 1997).

The sample consisted of 303 therapists who had filed a child-abuse report against at least one of their clients.

The researchers were interested in finding the best predictors of a client’s reaction (y) to the report, where y is measured on a 30-point scale. (The higher the value, the more favorable was the client’s response to the report.)

The independent variables found to have the most predictive power are as follows:

x1: Therapist’s age 1years2 x2: Therapist’s gender 11 if male, 0 if female2 x3: Degree of therapist’s role strain 125@point scale2 x4: Strength of client@therapist relationship 140@point scale x5: Type of case 11 if family, 0 if not2 x1 x2: Age * Gender interaction

a. Hypothesize a first-order model relating y to each of the five independent variables and the interaction term.

b. Give the null hypothesis for testing the contribution of x4, strength of client–therapist relationship, to the model.

c. The test statistic for the test suggested in part b was t = 4.408, with an associated p-value of .001. Interpret this result.

d. The estimated b coefficient for the x1 x2 interaction term was positive and highly significant 1p 6 .0012.
According to the researchers, “This interaction suggests that c as the age of the therapist increased, c male therapists were less likely to get negative client reactions than were female therapists.” Do you agree?

e. For the model presented here, R2 = .2946. Interpret this value.