Creating an Interdisciplinary Collaborative Network of Scholars in Child Maltreatment Prevention: A Network Analysis of the Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being.

Background: Child maltreatment is a complex problem requiring interdisciplinary collaborative research to generate innovative solutions. The Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being were designed to identify and nurture emerging scholars committed to child maltreatment prevention and create a supportive interdisciplinary learning network.

Objective: This paper examines connectivity within the collaborative network created by the fellowships program using longitudinal social network data.

Expert-generated standard practice elements for evidence-based home visiting programs using a Delphi process.

Background: States, territories, non-profits, and tribes are eligible to obtain federal funding to implement federally endorsed evidence-based home visiting programs. This represents a massive success in translational science, with $400 million a year allocated to these implementation efforts. This legislation also requires that 3% of this annual funding be allocated to tribal entities implementing home visiting in their communities.

Changing the home visiting research paradigm: models' perspectives on behavioral pathways and intervention techniques to promote good birth outcomes.

Background: The US is scaling up evidence-based home visiting to promote health equity in expectant families and families with young children. Persistently small average effects for full models argue for a new research paradigm to understand what interventions within models work best, for which families, in which contexts, why, and how. Historically, the complexity and proprietary nature of most evidence-based models have been barriers to such research.

A Public Health Approach to Prevention: What Will It Take?

Much of the fabric in today's society is at odds with planning a robust and generative public health response to child maltreatment prevention. A critical component of this problem is the absence of a public policy framework and related infrastructure that can create common ownership of the problem while recognizing the vast differences in individual willingness and capacity to alter their parenting behaviors. To address this challenge, it seems prudent to begin building a universal system of assessment and support that will touch all children and all families at multiple points in the developmental process.

An Experiential Cooking and Nutrition Education Program Increases Cooking Self-Efficacy and Vegetable Consumption in Children in Grades 3-8.

Objective: Evaluate the effect of a community-based, experiential cooking and nutrition education program on consumption of fruits and vegetables and associated intermediate outcomes in students from low-income families.

Design: Quasi-experimental program evaluation by pre-post survey of participating students and their parents.

Setting: Underserved elementary and middle schools in Chicago.

Creating community responsibility for child protection: possibilities and challenges.

Deborah Daro and Kenneth Dodge observe that efforts to prevent child abuse have historically focused on directly improving the skills of parents who are at risk for or engaged in maltreatment. But, as experts increasingly recognize that negative forces within a community can overwhelm even well-intentioned parents, attention is shifting toward creating environments that facilitate a parent's ability to do the right thing. The most sophisticated and widely used community prevention programs, say Daro and Dodge, emphasize the reciprocal interplay between individual-family behavior and broader neighborhood, community, and cultural contexts.

The role of community in facilitating service utilization.

Guided by an integrated theory of parent participation, this study examines the role community characteristics play in influencing a parent's decision to use voluntary child abuse prevention programs. Multiple regression techniques were used to determine if different community characteristics, such as neighborhood distress and the community's ratio of caregivers to those in need of care, predict service utilization levels in a widely available home visiting program. Our findings suggest that certain community characteristics are significant predictors of the extent to which families utilize voluntary family supports over and above the proportion of variance explained by personal characteristics and program experiences.

Understanding maternal intentions to engage in home visiting programs.

Little is known as to why some parents choose to engage in voluntary home visitation services while others refuse or avoid services. To address this knowledge gap, this study tests several hypotheses about the factors that influence maternal intentions to engage in home visitation services and the link between these intentions and the receipt of a home visit. The sample consists of an ethnically diverse group of mothers identified as at-risk for parenting difficulties (N = 343).

Finding common ground in the study of child maltreatment, youth violence, and adult domestic violence.

For several decades, we have witnessed a surge in public policies aimed at ending child maltreatment, youth violence, and adult domestic violence. Commensurate with this increased interest has been a growing body of research on each issue's etiology, affected population, and the public policy and prevention impacts. Even a cursory review of the literature suggests a number of commonalities across these forms of violence.

Sustaining new parents in home visitation services: key participant and program factors.

Objectives: As prevention efforts have adopted more intensive service models, concerns over initial enrollment and retention rates have become more salient. This study examines the participant, provider and program factors that contribute to a longer length of stay and greater number of home visits for new parents enrolling in one national home visitation program.

Methods: Retrospective data were collected on a random sample of 816 participants served by one of 17 Healthy Families America (HFA) program sites around the country.

Charting the waves of prevention: two steps forward, one step back.

Background: Over the past 30 years, the political response to child maltreatment and its prevention in the US has experienced periods of frantic activity, often followed by long periods of benign neglect. In reflecting on this history, Dick Krugman has referred to this uneven level of attention as a series of "waves" in which apparent progress is often minimized by an inability to sustain political commitment to a given reform or course of action. To an extent, this pattern reflects deep differences among child welfare advocates, researchers, and practitioners on how best to proceed.