Description of Tables and Categories

The following tables were designed to provide an overview of the Federal research effort in child abuse and neglect. The data were collected through the profiles sent in by each of the participating agencies, with some follow-up phone calls to clarify information. The data presented should be taken as "best estimates." The amount of missing data in each chart represents unreported or incomplete information.

Table 1 — presents the number of current Federal studies related to child abuse and neglect. In fiscal year 1998, the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Justice oversaw approximately 159 studies on child maltreatment. As might be expected, HHS funds the majority of the Federal child abuse and neglect research. Within HHS, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Children's Bureau and the Office on Child Abuse and Neglect (CB/OCAN) currently oversee 37 and 63 projects, respectively. Overall, about 38 of the studies were new for fiscal year 1998, and 121 were continued from last year.

Table 2 — shows that 99 studies had child abuse and neglect as a primary focus, and 60 had it as a secondary focus.

Table 3 — displays all the types of child maltreatment that are being studied. Although there is much debate over classification systems for child abuse and neglect, most researchers and clinicians are comfortable with four subtypes: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional maltreatment, and physical neglect. Roughly equal numbers of federally funded studies focus on physical abuse (98), sexual abuse (89), and neglect (93).

While earlier research in this field often did not differentiate between types of maltreatment, recent findings suggest different origins and sequelae for each subtype. There now seems to be a consensus that specificity is a valuable, if not crucial, step in data collection and analysis. As illustrated in Table 3, nearly twice as many of the child abuse-specific studies differentiated among maltreatment subtypes as did not (74 differentiated versus 46 undifferentiated).

Table 4 — shows the ages of the subjects reported. Multiple age groups are common.

Table 5 — categorizes the studies by the four research priorities described by the National Research Council's Panel on Research on Child Abuse and Neglect in Understanding Child Abuse and Neglect (1993). The categories include (1) research that explores the nature and scope of child maltreatment, (2) research that expands our understanding of the origins and consequences of child maltreatment, (3) research that improves treatment and preventive techniques, and (4) research that contributes to the development of a science policy for research on child maltreatment. These categories are reported under the child maltreatment focus for each project description.

Table 6 — roughly estimates the growth of the research effort over time.

We also attempted to collect data on the amount of money used within each agency for child abuse and neglect research. We found, however, that in many cases these figures were simply not available in any uniform way. Each agency uses different mechanisms for categorizing funding support, and the resulting figures were more misleading than informative. With regret, we have not included funding information in this set of tables.