Kotch, J. B., Smith, J., Margolis, B., Black, M. M., English, D., Thompson, R., Lee, L., Tajena, G., Bangdiwala, S. I. (2014). Does social capital protect against the adverse behavioural outcomes of child neglect? Child Abuse Review, 23, 243-261.
A history of child maltreatment has been linked to youth health risk behaviours (e.g., aggression, delinquency, smoking, alcohol use), and ultimately can result in serious social and health problems in adulthood. Though child neglect is the most common form of maltreatment, most child welfare studies to date have not differentiated between neglect and physical or sexual abuse. The data used were from LONGSCAN, a longitudinal study of the risks and consequences of child abuse and neglect, which focused here on two specific predictors—caregiver depression and social capital. Data were collected between 1992 and 2012 at five sites across the US. Subjects were children served by the child protection service system (baseline N = 1354) with a range of maltreatment experiences. A majority of the subjects (56%) were African American. Interview data were collected every 2 years from ages 4 to 18.
Included in the analysis were: (a) three outcome variables—externalizing problems (Achenbach’s Child Behaviour Checklist), youth smoking and youth drinking; (b) four control variables—gender, race/ethnicity, caregiver education and study site; and (c) eight possible predictors—household smoking or drinking, peer smoking or drinking, maltreatment history (physical, sexual or psychological abuse, neglect), caregiver self-reported depression (Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale), and two measures of social capital—Social cohesion and trust (SCT) and Informal social control (ISC). Adjusting for control variables, major findings were:
· For youth without a history of neglect, caregiver depression was a significant predictor of all three negative outcomes, regardless of social capital scores.
· Youth with a history of neglect were at high risk for all three negative outcomes. However, high SCT scores were found to significantly reduce two of the negative results of caregiver depression—externalizing behavior and alcohol use at age 18. No similar effect was found for ISC scores.
The authors suggest possible explanations for these findings, and offer ideas for preventive efforts—identification and treatment of caregiver depression and support of community cohesion and trust—which they believe could help to reduce the negative consequences of child neglect.
The longitudinal design used here introduced a number of complications, and required an elaborate analysis strategy. Interviews were conducted with primary caregivers at ages 4-16 and with the youths themselves at age 18. Maltreatment history was obtained from two sources--CPS allegations and youth self-report. The ISC and SCT scores, used to assess caregivers’ perceptions of neighborhood quality, were subscales of the Quality of Neighborhood Residential Stability & Organizational and Religious Affiliation measure (NOAA); each was calculated from 5 items on 4-point Likert scales.
For the analysis a stacked data set was constructed, with multiple observations per subject; predictors at each age category were matched with outcomes for the next age (e.g., predictors at age 12 with outcomes at age 14). Generalized estimating equations (GEE) were used. Neglected and non-neglected cases were analyzed separately; in each case SCT and ISC in turn were used as moderating variables. One possible limitation was the fact that the estimates of SCT and ISC were based on caregiver reports; they might therefore have been influenced by caregivers’ levels of depression.