Shedding the Constraints of Formal Systems in Research on Child Maltreatment Through High-Quality Measurement and Broad Population Surveys

Abstract

Improvements in our knowledge about child maltreatment require that we understand a exposures in the natural environments in which children live and (b) the nature of maltreatment based on current, shared definitions validated through empirical findings. These developments require (a) appropriately defining and measuring proximal maltreatment exposures with high quality, (b) determining the impacts of these exposures on a range of relevant indicators of child well-being, and (c) assessing these effects in the context of co-occurring factors such as other forms of maltreatment and factors in environments that may serve as prevention or intervention points. Research establishing maltreatment measures would benefit from independence from definitions used by the formal regulatory systems responsible for child welfare, i.e., Child Protective Services (CPS) and the associated legal infrastructure. Equally important is to observe child maltreatment in the lives of all children through engagement with populations outside of formal child welfare regulatory systems and across social, cultural, political, or institutional boundaries. This allows for the discovery of the etiology of maltreatment which may inform novel prevention strategies. In this article, we appeal for more “systems-free” research in measurement, modeling, data collection, and sampling with the goal of new discoveries in defining and recognizing childhood maltreatment and the varied social pathways of prevention. These methods would provide new insights into what to prioritize for prevention and intervention as well as discovery of contextual points of prevention and intervention, many of which may not involve existing child welfare systems.