The Neglect Study is a special neglect module added to The Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study, an on-going panel study that follows a birth cohort of 3,600 children born to unwed parents, and 1,100 children born to married parents from twenty US cities in fifteen states. The strengths of the Fragile Families project are that it provides longitudinal data for a nationally representative sample of a population at high risk for neglect, and that it collects extensive information on the socioeconomic factors required for this study. However, it was not designed to collect information on neglect, and extra data collection is required for our study.

The Neglect Study will add a module to this Fragile Families project that will collect systematic information on neglect through in-home assessments when the children under study are 30 and 48 months old. The assessments will provide first-hand information on the child’s physical environment and the quality of parenting and parent-child interactions — information that cannot be obtained through telephone surveys.