The term KiMiss is an art word from the German terms KindesMisshandlung (child maltreatment) or KindesMissbrauch (child abuse); KiMiss was originally chosen as the name of a research project examining child well-being under parental conflict and in particular inter-parental hostility (KiMiss project, University of Tuebingen, Germany). Parental conflict can in extreme cases lead to forms of child maltreatment or abuse. In this context, terms such as 'emotional child abuse' or 'psychological maltreatment' are often used. The common denominator of these and other terms is that not only physical or sexual forms of violence can have the intensity of child maltreatment or abuse. A major topic in the KiMiss project was the development of methods to quantify child maltreatment and abuse regardless of whether it originates from physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, or any other non-sexual form of maltreatment and abuse.
Many of these terms are based on dichotomous concepts like, for instance, neglect is present / is not present; dichotomous concepts, however, are not appropriate when the nature of the problem spans over a continuous scale. Parental conflicts can span over a very wide range, for instance from 'rather weak' to 'very serious'. This also applies to the possible consequences of parental conflicts, such as parental alienation, forms of neglect, or forms of maltreatment and abuse. Thus, a conceptual approach should treat such a 'continuous problem' in a more generalizable manner.
The KiMiss methodology uses an approach which describes not only parent conflict on a continuous scale, but also the consequences for child well-being. Child well-being is actually synonymous with a concept of quality of life of children. As such it can be described by continuous approaches as have been developed in quality of life research. Essentially, a scale is required that is capable to map the continuum of parent conflicts to the continuum of child well-being. The result of such methodological considerations has led to the scale of the so-called Loss of child well-being which is described as a percentage loss of well-being. For more information, see the Science page.