Overview and Design of the Child Maltreatment in Military Families Life Course Study

This report presents an overview of the objectives, design, and analytic strategy of the Child Maltreatment in Military Families Life Course Study, an investigation of factors associated with child maltreatment in active duty military families.

The study uses a case-control retrospective research design and discrete-time survival methodology to examine service member demographic characteristics, family characteristics, military-related characteristics, and military family life events associated with child maltreatment incidents that meet the Department of Defense definition of child abuse or neglect. The sample includes all active duty families with a first occurrence of child maltreatment anytime between Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 and FY 2018 (n  = 28,684), and a representative sample of control families with children under age of 18 during the same period (n  = 589,417). Analyses include child maltreatment and domestic abuse data from the Family Advocacy Program Central Registry; sponsor socio-demographic, military-related, and family data from the Active Duty Military Personnel Master and Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System data files; deployment data from the Contingency Tracking System; and mental health data from the Medical Data Repository.

Study results identify risk and protective factors associated with child maltreatment in military families, subgroups at elevated risk of child maltreatment, and periods of heightened risk during the military family life course. These results are expected to improve the ability to identify families most at-risk for particular types of child maltreatment and inform prevention strategies that promote the health and safety of military families.