Evaluating the risk of child abuse: the Child Abuse Risk Assessment Scale (CARAS)

Abstract

The present study developed the Child Abuse Risk Assessment Scale (CARAS), an actuarial instrument for the assessment of the risk of physical child abuse. Data of 2,363 Chinese parents (47.7% male) living in Hong Kong were used in the analyses. Participants were individually interviewed with a questionnaire assessing their perpetration of child abuse and some theoretically or empirically tested factors associated with child abuse. Using the split-half validation procedure, the 5-factor, 64-item CARAS was created and validated. When applying to the second half of the split sample, the CARAS had a sensitivity of 81.9%, a specificity of 77.8%, and an overall accuracy of 78.1%. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was .91. Overall, our findings showed that the CARAS is a simple, systematic and validated instrument identifying at-risk population of child maltreatment in Chinese societies.