The purpose of the present study is to suggest an alternative method of quantifying child maltreatment. The number of reports of child abuse and neglect to the North Carolina Department of Social Services was adjusted for the amount of time the child lived in the state and was therefore exposed to possible reporting to create the number of reports adjusted for exposure (NRAE). NRAE was then used as the dependent variable in a Poisson regression with information from 741 mothers interviewed in-depth shortly after the birth of a child. The analysis resulted in the identification of several additional predictors of child maltreatment.
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