Child maltreatment is a critical public health problem whose structural underpinnings underscore the need to move prevention efforts from individual-level risk factors to social policy. Material hardship is a multi-dimensional concept that captures the difficulty that families have meeting their basic needs related to housing, food, paying bills, and acquiring medical care. While studies have explored pathways between material hardship and child abuse, no ecological study to date has examined the association between specific social sources of neighborhood-level material hardships (i.e., food and housing insecurity, labor market disadvantage) and child maltreatment risk. The present study addresses this gap in the research literature by synthesizing several publicly available “big” datasets to consider associations between neighborhood level exposures to material hardship and substantiated child maltreatment risk, as well as explore its spatial and temporal dimensions. To do so, the following research questions were addressed: 1) is there inequality in the spatial risk of child maltreatment and, if so, has it changed over time?; 2) how do multiple material hardships (i.e., labor market characteristics in places of work and at home, food and housing insecurity) influence the spatiotemporal risk of child maltreatment above and beyond area level deprivation?; and 3) do labor market characteristics increase the relative risk of child maltreatment controlling for other measures of material hardship?
