County-level analysis on occupation and ecological determinants of child abuse and neglect rates employing elastic net regression.

Background: Occupation is a known determinant of worker physical and behavioral health risk, yet most previous studies have focused on unemployment, underemployment, and job satisfaction to understand child maltreatment risk.

Objective: This county-level study (n = 278) investigated the association between occupation and child maltreatment rates and community well-being in California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, and New Mexico.

Participants And Setting: States were selected due to having comparable, publicly available county-level data on substantiated child abuse and neglect rates within a five-year span between 2015 and 2020.