Substantiated and unsubstantiated cases of child maltreatment: Do their consequences differ?

CHILD abuse; CHILD welfare; CONSENSUS (Social sciences); SOCIAL work with children; SCHOLARS; SCHOLARLY periodicals; EMPIRICAL research

The article examines the common research practice of using only substantiated reports from child maltreatment registries. It states that maltreatment report registries have become almost indispensable for research that requires a large case base. However, inconsistent operational definitions of maltreatment have yielded a heterogeneous case base. Scholars have recognized the comparability problem that un-standardized definitions of maltreatment pose for accumulating a useful body of research findings, but they have not reached a consensus definition. In lieu of such consensus, researchers have fallen back on child welfare agencies' definitions, which have become, de facto, their operational definitions. Prominent scholars whose work is widely cited and emulated have thus made agency practice the basis of their research practice. Scholars have not empirically investigated the issue of using exclusively substantiated reports of maltreatment versus including unsubstantiated reports in research on child maltreatment. In a comprehensive search of the literature in journals that regularly include such research, no empirical study of this question was found.