This application is to conduct secondary analyses of existing data. These analyses will focus on factors that promote change and stability in resilience to maltreatment. The application has 5 aims: (1) To develop developmentally-sensitive and multidimensional models of resilience and to estimate the prevalence and stability of resilience over a 3-year period; (2) to trace trajectories of mental health problems, academic achievement, and peer relations among maltreated children (3) to identify individual, family, and extra- familial factors that predict change in these trajectories (4) to test hypotheses about the processes that explain continuity versus change in resilience to maltreatment (5) to test the potentially different effects of neglect, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse on children's cognitive achievement and mental health. Currently, interventions that are intended to promote short- or long-term improvements in maltreated children's functioning are hampered by a lack of evidence demonstrating why some children maintain consistently positive functioning while others do not, whether efforts to promote positive outcomes in one domain will generalize to other domains, and how interventions must be tailored to suit the needs of children who experience different forms of abuse or neglect. The proposed research will involve over 3000 school- age children who have participated in 4 waves of the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW). NSCAW is a nationally-representative sample of children who were selected from child protective service rolls. Children ranged in age from 6-14 years at the baseline assessment and were followed up at 12, 18, and 36 months post-baseline. Strengths of the application include its cost-effectiveness, the size and representative ness of the sample, low attrition rates over multiple waves of data collection, and the developmental nature of research questions that look at how changes in children's life circumstances influence changes in children's mental health, academic functioning, and peer relations over time.
