Social Work’s Trudy Festinger Reviews Interventions for Child Maltreatment

By Barbara Jester

Silver School of Social Work professor Trudy Festinger has been named to co-chair an international initiative that will review the effectiveness of interventions addressing child maltreatment. The project seeks to identify the gaps in knowledge for effective interventions and, for the first time, is reviewing material, both published and unpublished, gathered from an international search of databases.
    Festinger is undertaking this work as co-chair of the Campbell Collaboration Social Welfare Coordinating Group/Child Wel¬fare Interest Subcommittee. The Camp¬bell Collaboration is an international network of social scientists that produces, maintains, and disseminates systematic reviews of research evidence on the effectiveness of social interventions.
    According to Festinger, the first database search, completed with the assistance of a Norwegian research librarian/ search coordinator, revealed 4,500 abstracts of studies. A group of doctoral students from Colum¬bia University and the University of Toronto are presently reviewing these abstracts to winnow out those studies that are not methodologically sound or are not truly relevant.
    “We want to discover what therapies and interventions are the most successful ones in dealing with the maltreatment of children,” says Festinger. “This survey will help us learn this, and will also hopefully show us where the gaps in knowledge are, so that we can go forward to systematically build the best possible evidence base for future policies and programs.”
    Festinger will also be contacting researchers in the child welfare field in order to identify the “burning practice and policy questions” that remain unanswered and that could potentially be answered by this systematic review. The co-chair of the group will be doing the same with clinicians in the field.
    In May 2009 Festinger will report on the progress of the project at the Campbell Collab¬oration’s annual colloquium in Oslo, Norway, whose theme this year is “Better Evidence for a Better World.”