ECPN Student Poster Contestant: Specifying Latent County Profiles of Child Maltreatment Risk for Prevention Planning in North Carolina

Introduction: Nearly 7 million children received investigations as potential victims of abuse or neglect in 2015 in the U.S, and nearly 700,000 were found to be victims. North Carolina is one of nine states that leaves decision making to counties regarding which programs to implement to prevent child maltreatment. As prevention science has increasingly focused on what works for whom, it follows that we should not only be considering individual level moderators of program effectiveness, but moderators at the unit of implementation such as the organization or county. Thus, these analyses aimed to identify which county-level factors are most correlated with child maltreatment incidence.

Methods: Using surveillance data that is publicly available to county decision makers (American Community Survey, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation County Health Rankings, KIDS County, LINC, NCANDS), we use latent profile analysis to identify latent county profiles defined by the prevalence of risk and protective factors across the socio-ecological model as they relate to low, medium, and high levels of unsubstantiated child maltreatment reports.

Results: We report on the number of latent county profiles that are distinguished, which risk and protective factors may be most important for identifying to prevent child maltreatment, and associated limitations.

Conclusions: The latent profiles will be utilized in the creation of a system dynamics model that will simulate the comparative effectiveness of four child maltreatment prevention programs (Nurse Family Partnership, Triple P, Trauma-Focused CBT, and Parent Child Interaction Therapy) across each profile. Results will enable county decision makers to make decisions about which evidence based programs may be more aligned with their county context as defined by the relative prevalence of risk and protective factors across the socio-ecological model of child maltreatment in order to improve population health outcomes.