"Innovative Methods in Child Maltreatment Research"

Research methods serve as the foundation for everything we know about child maltreatment and its impact on subsequent health and development.  These methods inform the work of scientists, practitioners, and child welfare professionals on issues central to our daily lives, including how we assess child maltreatment during a home safety visit, how we distinguish it from other adverse childhood experiences during a clinical interview, how we demonstrate the risk child maltreatment poses for adverse health in the research laboratory, and how we develop evidence-based interventions in the community.  Despite significant strides in the past several decades, the failure to create and adopt innovative methods has left critical gaps in our understanding of child maltreatment, including a lack of well-characterized prospective research spanning key developmental periods, variation in risk estimates across studies that has increased replication failures of scientific results, a lack of mechanistic research examining risk pathways across different levels of analysis to identify targets for intervention, and limited attention on how to optimize the effectiveness, efficiency, and dissemination of interventions to reach the children at greatest risk and in greatest need.

The Innovative Methods in Child Maltreatment Research conference, being held in-person and virtually, will present the latest science that is addressing these gaps and advancing the study of child maltreatment into the 21st century. Internationally renowned speakers will present pragmatic solutions to the biggest challenges in our field across a range of topics over two days.  Presentations will be geared toward a diverse audience, including researchers, practitioners, and caseworkers, to facilitate the fastest uptake of novel methods for child maltreatment.

Co-Sponsored by the Child Study Center