Abstract
Although the emphasis on evidence-based interventions is a major step toward improving child protection systems, there are other equally important decisions to be made if we expect to use prevention as a way to reduce exposure to and the consequences of child maltreatment. Among them, allocating preventive service capacity is perhaps the most important. It is surprising therefore to learn just how little attention is devoted to understanding whether service allocations are at all related to need or outcomes when both are measured at a public health level.
Findings presented in the chapter suggest that the allocation of preventive services follows need, but that within the cluster of high-need communities, allocations vary considerably, with some high-need communities receiving smaller prevention investments. To close the paper, we argue that closer attention to hotspots where need, resources, and outcomes are misaligned represent fundamentally different resource allocation problems.
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Notes
- 1.
We use the terms social need and social disadvantage interchangeably. As attributes of populations as opposed to individuals, use of the terms is tied to their ecological meaning.
- 2.
- 3.
All of the models run use grand mean centering.
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Wulczyn, F.H., Feldman, S., Horwitz, S.M., Alpert, L. (2014). Child Maltreatment Prevention: The Problem of Resource Allocation. In: Korbin, J., Krugman, R. (eds) Handbook of Child Maltreatment. Child Maltreatment, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7208-3_18
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