Does the presence of siblings affect the results produced by a surveillance system of child mistreatment? Comparisons of several commonly-used statistical methods
Date
2015
Journal Title
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Publisher
BMC Research Notes
Abstract
Over time, the circumstances encountered in case of child mistreatment, can be quite complex and
then, can lead to methodological questions for the analysis of the data. Based on data coming from 395 children
hospitalized, alone (66.1 %) or in siblings (33.9 %), in a pediatric ward between 2007 and 2012 for mistreatment or
because of a severe risk of mistreatment, the aims of this paper were to quantify the degree of similarity between
sibling members, to study the differences between children hospitalized alone or with siblings and to compare four
statistical methods (logistic regression and GEE, both without and with robust standard error) for the analyses of the
associated factors of mistreatment.
Results: Almost all intracluster correlation coefficients were large, meaning that the sibling’s members have a higher
degree of similarity between them. The odds ratios were not exactly the same between the two models and the
robust standard errors where almost always higher than the model-based standard errors in both logistic and GEE
models leading to wider confidence intervals.
Conclusion: Because many of the intra-siblings correlations observed were relatively strong, the failure to take this
cluster dependency into account had a substantial effect on the statistical analyses. Methods taking into account the
cluster dependency are widely available in statistical software and strongly recommended
Description
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Keywords
surveillance, child maltreatment, methods, Logistic regression, siblings, clusters
Citation
Senterre, C., Levêque, A., Vanthournout, B., & Dramaix, M. (2015). Does the presence of siblings affect the results produced by a surveillance system of child mistreatment? Comparisons of several commonly-used statistical methods. BMC Research Notes, 8, 756.