The NIS is a congressionally mandated, periodic research effort to assess the
incidence of child abuse and neglect in the United States. The NIS has been
conducted approximately once each decade, beginning in 1974, in response
to requirements of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. Although
the Children’s Bureau collects annual state-level administrative data on
official reports of child maltreatment, the NIS studies are designed to
estimate more broadly the incidence of child maltreatment in the United
States by including both cases that are reported to the authorities as well as
those that are not. A unique contribution of the NIS has been the use of a
common definitional framework for classifying children according to types of
maltreatment as well as the severity of maltreatment.
The NIS gathers information from multiple sources to estimate the number of
children who are abused or neglected, providing information about the
nature and severity of the maltreatment, the characteristics of the children,
perpetrators, and families, and the extent of changes in the incidence or
distribution of child maltreatment since the time of the last national
incidence study. The NIS design assumes that the maltreated children who
are investigated by child protective services (CPS) represent only the “tip of
the iceberg.” Although the NIS estimates include children investigated by
CPS, they also include maltreated children who are identified by
professionals in a wide range of agencies in representative communities. The
NIS-4, the most current data collection, gathered data in a nationally
representative sample of 122 counties selected to ensure the necessary mix
of geographic regions and of urban and rural areas. Information related to
NIS-1, NIS-2 and NIS-3 can be found at
https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/systemwide/statistics/nis/.