Fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS–4)

maltreatment situations only to CPS. Just under one-fifth of the sentinels (19%), onaverage, would not give the situations described to either the study or to CPS.While there are important limitations to these SDS findings, as noted below,they do suggest that sentinels encounter maltreatment situations that do not enter the NIS.The NIS clearly cannot cover situations that the sentinels do not give either to CPS or tothe study. Moreover, the percentages across the maltreatment categories point to areaswhere coverage may be stronger or weaker than others. It appears that NIS coverage isprobably best for the sexual abuse cases that sentinels encounter, since an average of 67%of sentinels said they would give these cases to the study and only 5% would not submitthe described situations to either the study or CPS. Physical abuse, emotional abuse, andphysical neglect appear to have similar coverage profiles in the table, with an average ofslightly more than one-half of the sentinels saying they would submit the situations to thestudy and only between one-seventh and one-sixth saying they would not give thesituation to either the study or CPS.These findings suggest that the NIS coverage may be relatively weak foreducational and emotional neglect. Although an average of about 41% of the sentinelssaid they would give the educational neglect situations to the NIS, almost one in threesentinels said they would give these cases to neither CPS nor the study. In response tothe emotional neglect vignettes, although an average of 49% of sentinels say they wouldsubmit such situations to the study, more than one-fifth (22%) would not submit thesecases to either a national study or CPS.Completeness of data from school sentinels. The SDS also looked at selfpredictedresponses to maltreatment according to the type of agency in which the sentinelworked, classifying sentinels into four broad groups: school, health, law enforcement,and other. As previous sections reported, school sentinels overwhelmingly predominateas a recognition source of maltreated children in the NIS. Their preeminence among theNIS recognition sources might imply that school sentinels are most likely to submit theirsuspected cases to the NIS. However, the SDS findings suggest otherwise, as Figure 7–3illustrates.The NIS coverage should be strong for those cases that sentinels submitdirectly to a national study. In the SDS, school sentinels were the least likely of the fourSDS sentinel groups to say they would submit the maltreatment situations to a study such7-13