A community sensitive mixed-methods protocol for parental reporting of child sexual abuse

This article presents a community sensitive mixed methods protocol for studying parental reporting of child sexual abuse. The protocol combines a brief school based cross sectional survey among parents with service linked in-depth interviews involving parents of affected children. It was developed to address a common limitation in child sexual abuse reporting research, namely the separation of community level reporting attitudes from case based family experiences. The protocol uses a low burden four item survey and semi-structured interview guide. The two strands are integrated at the interpretation stage through a narrative joint display that compares normative endorsement of reporting with lived reporting barriers. The protocol specifies the quantitative multistage random sampling procedure, participant flow, qualitative case access involving parents of affected children, thematic coding procedures, and concrete examples of mixed-methods integration to strengthen reproducibility. The protocol is designed to be feasible, ethically sensitive, and reproducible in community and low-resource settings. It may be useful for researchers seeking to study discrepancies between support for formal reporting in principle and the practical difficulties families face when abuse is disclosed.•Combines community based parent surveying with service linked parental interviewing in one ethically structured design.•Uses a brief reporting attitudes instrument and a domain based interview guide to generate complementary forms of evidence.•Provides a replicable workflow for recruitment, safeguarding, qualitative analysis, and mixed methods integration.