Defining the Community Context for Parent-Child Relations: The Correlates of Child Maltreatment

Abstract

This report presents the results of studies designed to illustrate the use of child maltreatment report data as social indicators of the quality of life for families. It addresses the feedback function of family-support systems and links maltreatment to the overall balance of stresses and supports in the neighborhood context of families. This study focuses on the reported incidence of child abuse and neglect at 2 levels of neighborhood analysis within a single metropolitan county-20 neighborhood areas and 93 census tracts. Multiple-regression analysis is used to develop predictive equations using socioeconomic, demographic, and some attudinal data as the independent variables. For the 20 subareas, 81% of the variance and for the 93 census tract, 52% of the variance is accounted for. Data on the source of reports tend to discount the widely held position that biased reporting accounts for the negative correlation between socioeconomic status and chold maltreatment. The results are related to an emerging ecological perspective on human development.