Throughout this research there is going to be information that is going to show the relationship between community socioeconomic characteristics and ethnicity with the three different types of child maltreatment; neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. In the research about child maltreatment reports in Israel, the researcher claims in the hypothesis that socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the localities are associated with the number of maltreatment reports. The Arab communities being more rural and most of them having lower socioeconomic status than the Jewish population.
Since they have higher poverty and crime in Arabs. The researcher was specific enough to claim that they would expect higher rates of child maltreatment than in the Jewish community. The researchers used one tail hypothesis because they expect the reports of maltreatment to be higher in the Jewish community. One tail hypothesis would give the researchers more power to be able to reject the null hypothesis. The population for this study are all the children of Israel that are Jewish and Arab communities. They are the population of the study because the results would may apply to those groups of people.
But, since the researcher could not be able to use all of the people in the population to be in this study, the researcher is going to use a sample of the population. The sample of the population for the study consisted of 231 local authorities in Israel (of a total of 256, 98% of all children in Israel. The overall distribution was that 170 localities were Jewish and 84 were Arab. The sampling strategy used in this study was a stratified sample. Stratified sampling is a probability sampling technique that the researcher uses to divide the population into sub-groups.
In this case is a stratified sampling because it used two sub-groups to study based on their characteristics and ethnicity. Descriptive statistics summarizes and organizes a group of data or values in a way that can be useful (Steinberg, 2013). For instance, one of the numeric values described in the study is that the total population of Jewish is made up of median age, children age 0-4, elderly (more than 75 years old) of which in this case the sample population is well represented to the total population because everyone in this study can have the opportunity to represent the total population.
Another numerical value presented in the study is that there are three types of maltreatment being reported. The total number of reports of the Jewish children being maltreated are 28,498 and the total number of reports of Arab community are 5, 253 children. In this case, the researcher would have to investigate the mean to make a comparison between the two groups. The three types of reports are physical, sexual, and neglect. On the report of the Jewish community, the researcher found that 10, 377 children reported physical abuse. Furthermore, the researcher found that in neglect of Jewish there is 10, 212 being reported.
However, the Arab community has reported only 1,928 of physical abuse and 2,368 of neglect. Even though, the researcher does not have the same amount of participants in the study, the researcher could make a decision using the mean and the standard deviation in order to be acquired in the comparison of the study. The study presented is a quasi- experimental design on which is looking at the relationship between community characteristics and child maltreatment reports. Quasi experiments are used to measure the correlation between two variables.
Quasi experiments are useful when the variables can’t be manipulated by the researcher because it can be unethical for the individual in the study. The variables in this research cannot be manipulated that’s why the researcher uses correlation to predict the relationship between the variables. One of the major research variables are demographics and age factors. In this case the researcher couldn’t manipulate the variables. But, they can be useful to measure the relationships between the groups within the variables to test, if one group of ethnicity tends to have more child maltreatment than the other.
The level of measurement of demographics is at a nominal level. The reason of claiming that demographic is at a nominal level is because demographics doesn’t involve any numerical value. Furthermore, another major variable that the researcher used is the socioeconomic status of which is at ordinal level of measurement, the reason for claiming that socioeconomic status is at ordinal level is because the researcher is ranking the sample population base on numbers 1-10 with 1 being lowest.
Finally, another major variable is educational level that is measured at an interval level because the distance between the variables are meaningful and equally space. Demographic and age factors: The size of the locality was to integrate the total population averaged number from the results obtained in 2004 through 2006. The proportion of children ages 0- 4 was displayed as the percentage of the overall population. Furthermore, children ages 0-17 was computed as the percentage of the overall population. Socioeconomic status: Each locality is marked as on a scale of 1-10 ranking with 1 being the lowest socioeconomic status.
Unemployment is the percentage of adults currently without any job which are receiving unemployment benefits. Education Achievement: The high school diploma necessary for postsecondary education in Israel. But, higher education refers to the percentage of people who have been pursuing a higher education. The researcher uses T test to compare the sample characteristics of Jewish and Arab localities. The T test for independent samples were measured using inferential statistics based on the mean and the standard deviation.
In order to find the mean of the population, the researcher have to add all the numbers that was in the research and divide that number by the number of people that were participating on the research and that would give the mean of the population. Furthermore, we get the standard deviation by subtracting the mean and squared the result. After it, add all the numbers together and take the squared root of it and that result would be equivalent to the standard deviation. For instance, the Jewish localities of unemployment that correspond to -. 5 for the mean compared to the Arabs localities that have a higher unemployment of a mean that correspond to . 79. All the comparisons between the two localities were significant at a P < . 001. These results are important because it helps the researcher to know that the two localities do not share any characteristics of which shows that Jews and Arabs come from a different population. In this case the outcome of comparing Jewish and Arab is that we are going to reject the null and accept the alternative that these two groups of people don’t share similar characteristics.
Based on the hypothesis the researchers can claim that they are significantly different meaning that the result is going to be higher or lower reports in one of the localities. The researchers are also using Pearson correlations which are the relationships between two variables. It is important to use correlation between two variables because if we know the value of one variable and they correlate to each other, then we can make prediction about the other variable.
They are different variables that can be used to determine the different types of abuse in the two groups of which is the major priority for the researchers because we could show that child maltreatment can be associated on socioeconomic factors. The two asterisks mean that they are a statistical significant under the curve of P < . 01. The one asterisks mean they are a statistical significance under the curve of P < . 05. The statistical significance is comparing the calculate Pearson to the critical value. On which we can reject the null and accept the alternate, there is no influence between the variable and the type of abuse.
In the comparison between the Jewish and Arabs socioeconomic characteristics and the types of maltreatment been report. The three types of maltreatment; physical, sexual, and neglect abuse for Jews total population have a significance difference of which means that the overall in the Jewish localities were experiencing more maltreatment being reported. Furthermore, community characteristics were also significantly associated with the various types of reports. Physical and neglect abuse, both showed the highest correlation with unemployment. For instance, physical abuse has a negative correlation of -. 9 with unemployment, meaning that is a strong negative correlation between the two variables and also show a large effect. Also neglect has a negative correlation of -. 51 both at a P < . 01, meaning that it has a probability of less than . 01 of committing a type 1 error under the curve. Sexual abuse showed a weaker negative correlation with unemployment at a Pearson r = -. 28, P < . 01 and with a size of the total population of r = . 31, P < . 01. It means that the relationship between sexual abuse and unemployment have a moderate effect size.
In these three results of the relationship between physical, neglect and sexual abuse have an important outcome, it supports the hypothesis because the researchers can reject the null and accept the alternative that socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the localities are associated with the number of maltreatment reports. The Arabs community showed no statistical significance in the relationship between unemployment and the three types of maltreatment. It is interesting that people economic factors can be the influence of the total of maltreatment that has been reported by the Jews.
But, the economic factor does not show an effect on the Arabs community. For instance, people who are unemployed at the Jews community tends to have higher physical, sexual, and neglect abuse than the Arabs community. But, the Arabs show a low reports of child maltreatment being associated with the unemployment. For instance, the Arab show a r = . 04 of physical abuse and neglect abuse being reported which means that there is a weak correlation between the two variables and it shows a small effect size. But, it has a r = -. 06 of sexual abuse on which is higher than the other types of abuse being reported.
Unemployment and sexual abuse showed a negative, weak correlation with a small effect size. Furthermore, in the Arabs localities relationship between the age pattern and the types of maltreatment reported showed a strong correlation between the two variables. Children ages of 0-4 years have a significant statistic on physical abuse of r = . 37 at a P < . 01, meaning that it has a moderate correlation between the two variables with a magnitude of medium effect size. Also neglect shows a strong positive correlation of r = . 56 at a P < . 1, meaning that it has a magnitude of large effect size of the relationship between the two variables. On the other hand, sexual abuse has a r = . 11 with no statistical significance. The relationship with the age pattern shows a weaker positive correlation between the two variables, meaning that the researchers cannot predict that if Arabs have children of ages 0- 4 years there is not going to be a higher predictor of sexual abuse. These results help the researchers because it shows that age pattern has a relationship predictor with the types of maltreatments in Arabs community.
On which the researcher can reject the null and accept the alternative of physical and neglect abuse for children of ages of 0-4 years, meaning that demographic and age factors predict the relation of the types of maltreatment being reported. In both Arab and Jewish localities, community characteristics predicted sexual abuse less strongly than the reporting of other forms of maltreatment. The overall results of the study are that even though, there was a large socioeconomic and cultural differences between Jewish’s and Arabs, there was no significant difference between the two groups of localities.
However, the researcher found a positive correlation between the availability of social workers and the rate of reported maltreatment, but not a significant difference to the maltreatments reports from the two groups. Furthermore, these findings may reflect the similarity in socialization between the two groups, who is educated and trained in the same educational settings. In this study, the researcher doesn’t support the original research hypothesis because in the findings it shows that Jewish community based on the findings shows a significantly more reports of sexual abuse and physical abuse than Arabs communities.
Reporting rates also showed a different association with socioeconomic and demographic variables. The researcher justified their findings by saying that the information was gathered on the administrative database aggregated at the locality level, it does not permit to closely analyze at the family-child level. It is important to the researcher to aggregate the locality level because the research can analyze hide information within localities.