Frequency, characteristics, and child and parent risk factors for nonfatal injury in rural children

PURPOSE: We sought to identify child and parent risk factors for nonfatal unintentional injury among rural children.METHODS: Design: cross-sectional health interview survey. Setting: a completely rural midwestern county not adjacent to a metropolitan area. Participants: stratified, random sample of farm, town, and nonfarm, nontown households, including parents of all children aged 0-17 years. Outcome measures: parent-reported injury episodes that occurred in the past 12 months in children that required professional care, restricted normal activities for at least four hours, or resulted in blacking out or losing awareness or memory. Potential risk factors included nine child factors and six parent factors.RESULTS: Of the 621 children in participating households, 137 or 22.1% were injured. Children on a sports team were 1.88 times (95% confidence interval: 1.07 to 3.31) more likely than other children to be injured. Track team members were more likely than non-members to have an injury (54.5% vs. 23.0%, chi square test, p = 0.001), and volleyball team members were more likely than non-members to have an injury (50.0% vs. 29.0%, chi square test, p = 0.009). Unrelated to injury status were the child's gender, rural stratum, emotional health, behavioral problems, impairment or medications. Also unrelated to child injury were the parent's marital status, alcohol dependence, binge drinking, antisocial personality, depression symptoms or fear of child abuse by spouse.CONCLUSIONS: Our findings illustrate the difficulty of discovering clues with potential to aid design of effective childhood unintentional injury prevention policies, programs, and practices. The instruments and processes in our study were of acceptable quality, therefore we failed to asses the true risk factors for childhood injury or our sample size was too small to detect associations with the factors that were included.