Abstract
This chapter from the book Re-Visioning Public Health Approaches for Protecting Children considers how the outcomes of alternative care and treatment in child protection can be assessed and the potential promise of public health approaches to child maltreatment. Despite decades of research in the field of child welfare, it is not possible to make causal claims about the outcomes of alternative care and treatment in child protection. Randomised control trial research is not ethical or feasible because children may not be randomly allocated to different types of alternative care. Instead, other research designs are relied upon, but there are significant challenges arising from definitional issues, methodological limitations and potential bias. Prospective longitudinal research with population-based samples is best positioned not only to provide information on outcomes associated with alternative care, but also the contributions of risk and protective factors to outcomes. A public health approach to child maltreatment can provide a more systematic approach to achieving and measuring children’s outcomes. Public health approaches are also favoured by political and technological trends. Governments are increasingly adopting a social investment approach, demanding return on investment. The advent of big data enables researchers to track children’s outcomes through linking with data generated by other public systems such as education, health and criminal justice.