The Children and Family Research Center (CFRC) has published a new study, “Child Maltreatment Re-port, Substantiation and Foster Care Placement: A Latent Class Analysis of Child, Caregiver, and Household Risk Factors Across Screened-In and Screened-Out Cases“.

This study by Dr. Yuerong Liu and colleagues combined qualitative coding of CPS intake reports with latent class analyses to explore the typologies of children and families based on documented risk factors in both screened-in and screened-out families. They also examined how the typologies were associated with maltreatment re-report, substantiation, and foster care placement over a three-year follow up. They identified four groups of children—financial hardship, caregiver drug use, child health issues, and domestic violence. Children facing financing hardship had the highest risk of future CPS involvement. Even when cases were screened out, some children still faced serious outcomes.

A study by Dr. Theodore Cross (retired) and Dr. Yu-Ling Chiu has also been published, titled “Evaluation of outcomes of Mississippi’s Child Advocacy Studies (CAST) initiative“.

Child Advocacy Studies (CAST) is an academic program in the United States responding to the need in colleges and graduate schools for education on child maltreatment. More than 100 American colleges and universities offer CAST courses or a multi-course CAST academic program. CAST students showed significant improvements from the beginning to the end of their CAST course in their self-rating of their skills in child protection and in their judgment in response to vignettes about child maltreatment. This study offers evidence for the value of a CAST program.