| Although various professionals are required to make judgements about risk for child abuse and neglect, there are currently no general guidelines available to aid in this task. To address this issue, I developed the Child Abuse Risk Evaluation (CARE) based on a review of the empirical and professional literatures. In Study 1, as a first step in the evaluation of the guidelines, I solicited feedback from a number of experts in the field. In Study 2, after revising the guidelines in light of the feedback from experts, I presented the revised CARE at a training workshop. Attendees were asked to evaluate the guidelines and the training workshop, and their comments generally were positive. In addition, six of the workshop attendees and two additional raters used the CARE to rate the presence or absence of the 14 CARE risk factors as well as the overall level of risk in a number of case studies. There were eight case studies in total; raters were randomly assigned four of the cases. Good interrater reliability was demonstrated for overall risk and for most of the 14 risk factors. These are promising results and suggest that further validation of the CARE is warranted. |
