Development of a Child Abuse Level Management (CALM) Guide for Research with Young Children

Reporting child abuse or neglect is an ethical expectation and a legislated mandate of behavioral and health care professionals in the United States. In particular, researchers who investigate parent–child dyads are responsible for submitting procedures and informed consent documents to institutional review boards that provide for the protection of children. The challenge for researchers is to recognize failing quality of parent–child interaction, prior to any event of maltreatment and to intercede in a deteriorating dynamic. The obligation to report any suspicions of child maltreatment supersedes the responsibility to provide for confidentiality of research data. The purpose of this paper is to describe the rationale for the development of a research protocol guide, Child Abuse Level Management (CALM), and address protection of children in research. The CALM is a brief, flexible guide designed for use by researchers to help identify and respond to negative trends in the parent–child interaction during data collection. Suggested intervention scripts are provided that can be modified for specific culture-focused samples. The CALM guide can be used for training of data collectors using simulations prior to initiating any study involving higher-risk dyads.