The Role, Importance and Challenges of Data for a Public Health Model

Abstract

This chapter highlights methodological and practical issues in data integrity and the role of data in a public health model. It considers definitional issues of child maltreatment and how this influences measurement of the incidence/prevalence of maltreatment by the inclusion or omission of individuals from databases. This chapter considers the challenges of administrative data, mortality data and child death reviews and using cross-sectional national studies, survey data. It discusses the strengths and limitations of use of administrative data sets (for example child protection, and health datasets) – in isolation as single sources of information and by linking these datasets to identify and measure associations with known and potentially unknown risk indicators.