FAMILY FUNCTIONING IN STRESSED AND MALTREATING FAMILIES

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This study's overall objective is to contribute to a collaborative network in investigating how family factors influence child-well being, and in turn how certain societal interventions can interact with these factors in influencing a child's development, by capitalizing on an existing dataset of The Longitudinal Studies in Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN). the LONGSCAN project is a consortium of cohort studies examining the impact of maltreatment and social service intervention on children's level of functioning over time. LONGSCAN's involvement would bring to the NICHD consortium a database and research perspective from what is the largest and most ambitious longitudinal effort in the area of child maltreatment. The LONGSCAN project is identifying families of young children who have been maltreated or are at risk for maltreatment. Focusing on these high risk families will allow for a more intensive examination of many of the potential risk factors and mediating variables that influence the psychological and social outcomes in children. The study's specific aims are to: 1) examine the impact of family structure, poverty, parenting attitudes, family satisfaction, spousal relationships and social service interventions on child well-being among a group of families identified as at high risk for child maltreatment, 2) define which domains within the broader context of family functioning are most important as mediators of child well-being in high risk maltreating families, 3) validate the importance of the selected domains within the concept of family functioning through the selective investigation of data from other datasets, 4) obtain guidance from the NICHD consortium to challenge and assist individual LONGSCAN investigators at their respective sites to examine the impact of social service interventions through longitudinal data analysis, and 5) determine the best measure or conglomeration of measures of family functioning to be used in future research studies and later data points within LONGSCAN. This study will involve a three phased approach to our cooperation with the Consortium. In phase 1 existing cross-sectional data from LONGSCAN will be analyzed in a case-control manner to identify the functioning domains most associated with indicators of child well-being. In phase 2 the study will seek validation of the domains from other NICHD consortium members. In phase 3 this study group will institute such changes as are appropriate in the measures used by LONGSCAN to capture the domains determined most relevant to subsequent child well-being. Finally, because of the ongoing data collection proceeding a part of LONGSCAN during our involvement with the NICHD Consortium, this study will be able to examine the relationships between new instruments or domains and instruments previously used by LONGSCAN to assess family functioning. This final step is likely to proceed after completion of the proposed five year involvement with the NICHD Consortium.