Community-level factors and child maltreatment in a suburban county

The research discussed in this article examined the relationship between neighborhood structural factors and child maltreatment report rates in a suburban county through replication of a method used in a study of child maltreatment in Cleveland, Ohio. Rates of child maltreatment were calculated for the county's 159 census tracts. Principal components analysis of 11 variables hypothesized to represent structural features of community social organization produced three factors, instability, economic disadvantage, and family characteristics. The three factors, plus interaction terms, accounted for 43.6 percent of the variance in the rates of child maltreatment. Comparison with the Cleveland results revealed differences in the role of instability in predicting neighborhood level maltreatment rates.