Safety and risk assessment in child welfare Moving forward

Assessing immediate child safety and the risk of future child maltreatment, are essential in the work of child welfare professionals, as interventions can only be effective if they are based on the results of accurate assessments. The availability of reliable and valid instruments is a prerequisite for properly conducting these assessments. Yet, evidence-based safety and risk assessment instruments are scarcely available in child welfare. Therefore, the primary aim of this dissertation was to improve safety and risk assessment procedures in child welfare. The following studies were performed to achieve this aim: A qualitative review on the immediate child safety aspects that are assessed in international safety assessments instruments (Chapter 2), a qualitative study on the content validity and usability of the ARIJ safety assessment instrument (Chapter 3), a mixed-methods study on the concurrent validity of the ARIJ safety assessment instrument (Chapter 4), a study on the reliability of the ARIJ safety and risk assessment instrument (Chapter 5), a study on the predictive validity of the ARIJ risk assessment instrument (Chapter 6), and a study on the interrelatedness of risk factors for child maltreatment in which the innovative network analysis technique was applied to the child maltreatment field for the first time (Chapter 7).