Background

When people suspect a child or young person is experiencing, or at risk of, abuse or neglect, they have to decide how to respond. However, the under and over reporting of child welfare issues indicate that people may struggle to identify an appropriate response.

Objective

To develop scenarios (for future training and research purposes) that closely resemble the child welfare situations health/allied health practitioners encounter, and for which there is a reasonable level of child protection professional consensus as to what the appropriate response for each situation should be.

Participants, setting, and methods

We developed 285 scenarios from 190 child protection reports made by health/allied health practitioners to two Australian government child welfare agencies, that covered a range of appropriate response pathways and abuse types. An appropriate response pathway for each scenario was identified by having 34 child protection professionals provide their opinion and rationales.

Results

Child protection professionals displayed moderate (e.g., krippendorf’s alpha = 0.58, 95 % CI: 0.52 to 0.62) interrater agreement as to the appropriate response pathway for the scenarios. For 127 of the 285 scenarios (44.56 %), there was strong consensus (K = 0.73, 95 % CI: 0.66 to 0.78).

Conclusion

Professional consensus was higher than anticipated from previous research, although still low compared to generally acceptable levels of consensus. Our results suggest several promising avenues to increase professional consensus, such as improving the quality of information that people typically report to child welfare agencies.

中文翻译：

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对潜在虐待儿童的适当反应：信息质量的重要性

背景

当人们怀疑儿童或年轻人正在遭受虐待或忽视或有遭受虐待或忽视的风险时，他们必须决定如何应对。然而，儿童福利问题的报道不足和过度表明人们可能难以确定适当的回应。

客观的

制定与健康/专职医疗从业人员遇到的儿童福利情况非常相似的情景（用于未来的培训和研究目的），并且对于每种情况应该采取何种适当的应对措施，儿童保护专业人士已达成合理水平的共识。

参与者、设置和方法

我们开发了 285 种情景，其中包括健康/相关健康从业人员向两家澳大利亚政府儿童福利机构提交的 190 份儿童保护报告，涵盖了一系列适当的应对途径和虐待类型。通过让 34 名儿童保护专业人员提供意见和理由，确定了针对每种情况的适当响应途径。

结果

儿童保护专业人员在情景的适当响应路径方面表现出中等（例如，krippendorf 的 alpha = 0.58，95% CI：0.52 至 0.62）之间的一致性。对于 285 种情景中的 127 种（44.56 %），有很强的共识（K = 0.73，95 % CI：0.66 到 0.78）。

结论

专业共识高于先前研究的预期，尽管与普遍接受的共识水平相比仍然较低。我们的研究结果提出了几个有希望的途径来增加专业共识，例如提高人们通常向儿童福利机构报告的信息质量。