Citation

Winefield HR, Bradley PW. Child Abuse Negl. 1992; 16(5): 661-671.

Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, University of Adelaide, South Australia.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1992, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

1393726

Abstract

Underreporting and overreporting of suspected child abuse and neglect cases reduce the efficiency of child protection services. We used all the reports in South Australia for 1988-1989 (N = 3,228) to study the determinants of the decision by child protection workers to register a reported incident as being one of child abuse and neglect. Logistic regression showed that registration (substantiation) was predictable from two variables: the age of the alleged victim and the caseworker's estimate of severity. This latter variable needs investigation, as despite its crucial role we have no information on how caseworkers form a judgment about severity.

Language: en