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Methodological Moderators in Prevalence Studies on Child Maltreatment: Review of a Series of Meta-Analyses.
- Source :
- Child Abuse Review; Mar/Apr2017, Vol. 26 Issue 2, p141-157, 17p
- Publication Year :
- 2017
-
Abstract
- Insight into the effects of methodological characteristics on reported child maltreatment prevalence rates can facilitate the interpretation of results of previous studies and improve the design of future prevalence studies. We reviewed findings from four previous meta-analyses (Stoltenborgh et al., , , , ) on methodological moderators in self-report prevalence studies on child sexual ( k = 323, N = 410,951), physical ( k = 157, N = 250,167) and emotional abuse ( k = 42, N = 76,586), and physical ( k = 13, N = 59 406) and emotional neglect ( k = 16, N = 59 655). We provide an overview of the moderating effects of participant characteristics (e.g. age), the sampling method and measurement characteristics (e.g. validation). No characteristic was without influence, but specific characteristics were significant moderators for certain types of abuse and not for others. This implies that the wide range of lifetime prevalence rates reported in the literature can partly be explained by methodological differences. Our best-evidence synthesis (sexual abuse: k = 4, N = 52 749; physical abuse: k = 2, N = 40 341; emotional abuse: k = 6, N = 4029; emotional neglect: k = 3, N = 3226) suggests that depending on the methodological characteristic under consideration a certain prevalence rate can be an over- or underestimation of the actual prevalence. Taking methodological characteristics' influence into consideration and choosing a sound methodology can help to get as close as possible to the actual child maltreatment prevalence. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key Practitioner Messages The methodological quality of studies affects the reported lifetime prevalence rates of child maltreatment, but the direction of this effect depends on the indicator of methodological quality., A higher response rate is related to a higher reported lifetime prevalence of child maltreatment for all maltreatment types except physical abuse., A sound study design and methodology can help researchers to get as close as possible to the actual lifetime prevalence of child maltreatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- RESEARCH methodology evaluation
CHILD abuse
CONFIDENCE intervals
ERIC (Information retrieval system)
PSYCHOLOGY information storage & retrieval systems
MEDLINE
META-analysis
ONLINE information services
PROBABILITY theory
REGRESSION analysis
RESEARCH funding
SEX distribution
STATISTICS
SYSTEMATIC reviews
SAMPLE size (Statistics)
MEASUREMENT errors
EFFECT sizes (Statistics)
INTER-observer reliability
HUMAN research subjects
PATIENT selection
DATA analysis software
DESCRIPTIVE statistics
INTRACLASS correlation
EVALUATION
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 09529136
- Volume :
- 26
- Issue :
- 2
- Database :
- Complementary Index
- Journal :
- Child Abuse Review
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 121990590
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1002/car.2433