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

as the NIS. Figure 7–3 shows that only 41% of school sentinels said they would submitthe cases to a national study, compared to between 44% and 58% of sentinels in the othergroups. As noted above, the NIS has mixed coverage of cases that sentinels submit toCPS, depending on whether CPS investigates them. The SDS also reveals that the schoolsentinels were least likely to say they would report maltreatment to CPS. Two-thirds(67%) of school sentinels said they would report countable maltreatment to CPS,compared to about three-fourths (73% to 77%) of sentinels in the other three groups.Figure 7–3.Responses to Maltreatment Vignettes in the SDS by Sentinel Groups.Limitations of these findings. The SDS methodology provided an artificialcontext and had three important limitations that qualify the implications of the findings.First, the study design equally represented the range of situations included in the NISdefinitions. It is unlikely that this distribution of maltreatment types corresponds to thedistribution of maltreatment situations that sentinels encounter in real life. The sentinelpercentages in Table 7–3 would undoubtedly look quite different if the componentvignettes contributed to the averages in proportion to sentinels’ real-world encounterswith situations corresponding to those described. Thus, it is not possible to apply thetable percentages to the main NIS findings to calibrate the undercoverage of themaltreated child population. The SDS findings are useful in highlighting in a generalway those areas where the NIS may have stronger or weaker coverage (following themodel of the discussion above). Second, the artificial context may establish expectations7-14