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The Child Maltreatment Lab has conducted research across various forms of maltreatment, including sexual abuse, physical abuse, and neglect. Research efforts have included development of assessments and interventions for victims and families, maltreatment prevention, and understanding the correlates and consequences of maltreatment.
Project SAFE Research
The lab has developed and evaluated a model intervention program based through the BraveBe Child Advocacy Center, Project SAFE (Sexual Abuse Family Education), which addresses the mental health needs of child victims and their families following sexual abuse. During the data collection period, a variety of assessment measures were collected from families at four time points throughout the intervention to better understand the difficulties they may be facing and evaluate intervention practices. The assessment battery used includes well-known and empirically supported measures such as the Child Behavior Checklist and Youth Self Report (Achenbach, 1991), the Children’s Depression Inventory (Kovacs, 1992), the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale (Reynolds & Richmond, 1985), the Symptom Checklist – 90 (Derogatis, 2000), the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scale (Olson, 1996), and the Family Crisis Oriented Personal Evaluation (McCubbin, Olson, & Larson, 1987). Research efforts also included the development of assessment instruments for evaluating outcomes, such as a weekly problems scale for child victims and their parents, and measures for assessing parent and child expectations for child functioning following sexual abuse. Findings indicate the positive benefits of Project SAFE services for victims and their families (e.g., Hubel et al., 2014; Sawyer & Hansen, 2014).
Head Start Research
Our research has also addressed maltreatment prevention in Head Start home-based and center-based programs. The lab’s Head Start research investigated risk factors using an ecological model, explored relationships among risks and substantiated abuse and neglect, and examined the program’s ability to identify and reduce risk.
Related Projects
Related projects examine the heterogeneous symptom presentation of child and adolescent sexual abuse victims and factors that influence symptom presentation. Recent research projects have used archival data from the BraveBe Child Advocacy Center in an effort to improve the identification of children who are at highest risk of sexual abuse and identify those at risk for revictimization. Additional, research projects included examining perceptions of child sexual abuse victim blame among undergraduate students at UNL and multiple dissertation projects using archival data to examine relationships between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral factors in adolescent girls enrolled in a residential treatment program.