Measuring Collective Efficacy in the Context of Community-Based Child Maltreatment Prevention

Abstract

Despite growing recognition of the importance of communities to children’s safety, efforts to translate this research into child maltreatment prevention initiatives has been lacking. In this article, we argue that one of the challenges to developing and evaluating community-based child maltreatment prevention efforts is identifying effective instruments for measuring community-level change. In particular, this article addresses the role of collective efficacy in promoting children’s safety, challenges with utilizing the existing measure of collective efficacy in the context of child protection, and the development of a new measure. After articulating a theoretical framework regarding the role of collective efficacy in child protection, existing strategies for measuring collective efficacy are reviewed and the strategy employed to devise a new measure is articulated. Ultimately, the new measure consisted of 15 items, and the scale had relatively high reliability (α = .848). Further, the scale fulfilled the criteria for construct and convergent validity. Because implementation science in the context of community-based child maltreatment prevention is relatively young, there is a need to better understand the mechanisms by which children’s safety is ensured. This study contributes to the literature on the relationship between collective efficacy and children’s safety.