Ethical Considerations for the Collection, Analysis & Publication of Child Maltreatment Data

Collecting information from children and their caregivers regarding child maltreatment is an important and challenging task. Although more attention has recently been paid to ethical considerations for this type of research and a growing number of documents can be found on this topic, internationally recommended or agreed upon ethical guidelines for collecting, analyzing and publishing child protection data are still missing (CP MERG, 2012). Through child maltreatment data studies, children and their caregivers are asked about children’s experiences with maltreatment. Methodologies include face-to-face interviews, telephone surveys and Computer Assisted Self Interviewing. The purpose of this paper is to provide practical suggestions to researchers who are conducting these types of studies. This project involved three activities: a review of the literature, interviews with key informants who have carried out child maltreatment data studies and the identification of case examples which illustrate ethical dilemmas and how these have been resolved.