A Solution:
"In the first phase of this research, a large group children who were abused, neglected, or both approximately 20 years ago were followed up through an examination of official juvenile and criminal records and compared with a matched control group of children.The rationale for identifying the abused and neglected group was that their cases were serious enough to come to the attention of the authorities.  Only court-substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect were included here.  Cases were drawn from the records of county juvenile and adult criminal courts in a metropolitan area in the Midwest during the years 1967 through 1971.  To avoid potential problems with ambiguity in the direction of causality and to ensure that temporal sequence was clear (i.e., child abuse or neglect leads to subsequent outcomes), abuse and neglect cases were restricted to those in which children were less than 11 years of age at the time of the abuse or neglect incident.  Thus, there are cases of early childhood abuse, neglect, or both."

Your Opinions:

1. Do you think that it was a good idea to limit the study to "court-substantiated cases"?  Why?  Why not?
2. The researchers planned to use a "matched control group of children."  If you were conducting the study, on what variables would you try to match non-abused children with those who had been abused?  (For example, they might be matched on race or ethnicity.)
3. Do you agree that it was a good idea to limit the study to children who were less than 11 years of age at the time of the abuse or neglect?  Why or why not?

Submit your post in the Case Study 5 on Experimental/Causal Comparative Designs discussion in eLearning.