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4. Publikationen Soziale Arbeit

Publication type:	Conference other
Type of review:	Not specified
Title:	The effectiveness of interventions to prevent child maltreatment : an umbrella review
Authors:	Gautschi, Joel Lätsch, David
et. al:	No
Conference details:	12th European Conference for Social Work Research (ECSWR), Milan, Italy, 12-14 April 2023
Issue Date:	13-Apr-2023
Language:	English
Subjects:	Child protection; Prevention; Child maltreatment; Intervention; Review
Subject (DDC):	362.7: Youth services
Abstract:	Background and purpose: Child maltreatment impairs the child’s integrity and is associated with physical, psychological, and social harm that may last into adulthood. Preventing the occurrence and chronicity of child maltreatment requires not only accurate assessments by social workers and other professionals at early stages, but also effective interventions. In response to this, interventions have been developed in recent decades and a substantial number of studies have examined their effects. The results of these studies have been synthesized in systematic reviews and meta-analyses for different types of interventions. What is lacking is a systematic and up-to-date overview and comparison of these reviews’ findings. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap and answer the following three questions: - How effective are interventions in preventing the occurrence and chronicity of child maltreatment? - For which groups of people and in which contexts have interventions been shown to be effective? - How robust is the empirical basis of these findings? Methods: A systematic review of systematic reviews, called umbrella review, was conducted. Ten databases on OvidSP and Web of Science were searched up to January 2022. Search terms were predefined along the search criteria for the following dimensions (criteria): Review type (systematic reviews, meta-analysis), population (children, various terms from newborn to adolescents), intervention (various terms for types of interventions), outcomes (child maltreatment, abuse and neglect, including exposure to intimate partner violence). Publications were selected based on predefined inclusion/exclusion criteria applied to titles/abstracts in a first step and to the full texts in a second step. Narrative synthesis was used to document the reviews’ findings. If several reviews were available for an intervention type, reviews were excluded according to the criteria of actuality, quality, and scope. Findings: n = 39 publications documenting systematic reviews or meta-analyses were included out of 1,850 unduplicated citations. Reported effects for these intervention types and context were often accompanied with high uncertainty. Where effects were found, they were mostly small and rarely moderate. The presentation will provide an overview of specific findings for the following intervention types: socioeconomic interventions, media campaigns, community-based interventions, primary care interventions, parent training and family therapy, home visiting, family group conferences, and interventions for specific problems. An overview of the quality of systematic reviews and meta-analyses is provided. Conclusions and implications: Limitations of the current state of research in relation to the review’s questions are discussed (e.g., the problem of aggregating results from studies on different interventions, the problem of too few replications in different contexts, limitations in research designs, reasons why effects might be over- or underestimated). An outline is given of how these limitations could be partially overcome. Finally, implications of the current state of these outcome studies for practice are drawn.
URI:	https://digitalcollection.zhaw.ch/handle/11475/28324
Fulltext version:	Published version
License (according to publishing contract):	Licence according to publishing contract
Departement:	Social Work
Organisational Unit:	Institute of Childhood, Youth and Family (IKJF)
Published as part of the ZHAW project:	Wirksamkeit von Interventionen zur Prävention von Kindesmisshandlung und -vernachlässigung
Appears in collections:	Publikationen Soziale Arbeit

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