The Center on Causal Data Science for Child Maltreatment Prevention (the CHAMP Center)

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SUMMARY/ABSTRACT – OVERALL In 2019, US state and county child protection investigators determined that 656,000 children were exposed to maltreatment by their caregivers. This number likely underestimates the true number of maltreated children by a considerable margin. Maltreatment exposure can disrupt psychobiological systems essential for a child’s health and adaptive functioning and result in debilitating outcomes such as post-traumatic stress, depression, self-destructive and violent behavior, risk-taking, and substance abuse. Yet only a small proportion of those children at risk have benefited from decades of research to acquire the scientific knowledge to prevent maltreatment exposures and their significant consequences. This proposal seeks to enable larger-scale preventative results through an integrated scientific program designed to address the central barrier limiting the scale of results: available preventative interventions are insufficiently guided by robust scientific knowledge on the complex etiologies of maltreatment exposures and their consequential outcomes. The Center on Causal Data Science for Child and Adolescent Maltreatment Prevention (CHAMP Center) is proposed to enable the achievement of larger-scale results by: 1) applying state-of-the-art causal data science methods to several large, relevant, existing data sets to determine the complex etiologies for several categories of maltreatment exposures (e.g., sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect) and maltreatment-related outcomes (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, self-destructive behavior, substance abuse, functional impairments); 2) translating this knowledge into specific decision support tools for practitioners in the child services system to personalize interventions that precisely target etiological factors; and 3) conducting a proof-of-concept field trial on this form of decision support. Through the integrated work of its two projects and three cores, the CHAMP Center will establish processes to discover and translate scientific knowledge on complex etiologies of maltreatment and its consequences and disseminate knowledge and tools for large-scale prevention of maltreatment exposures and their devastating consequences in children at risk.