Jamie Joseph is first author of Child Abuse & Neglect paper
Congratulations to 2024 graduate Jamie Joseph, PhD, on the publication of “Analysis of longitudinal patterns of child maltreatment reports in the United States,” which was published online ahead of print on December 24; it is scheduled to appear in the February 2025 issue of Child Abuse & Neglect. Associate professor Rameela Raman is senior and corresponding author of this paper. Co-authors include researchers at Northwestern, University of Kentucky, Vanderbilt’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Vanderbilt Center of Excellence for Children in State Custody.
Dr. Joseph, Dr. Raman, and their collaborators used National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS) data to quantify geographic variation in child maltreatment rate trajectories, with the larger goal of helping states “identify local risk factors to guide program development and resource allocation.” The team found “three groups of states with distinct child maltreatment trajectories, with majority of the states following a stable trajectory over time. There was not a consistent trend in socioeconomic characteristics between the three groups. While the results do not allow us to draw firm conclusions about socioeconomic characteristics associated with maltreatment trajectories, it does provide data driven evidence for the existing assumption of a national average maltreatment trajectory.”
Dr. Joseph is now a biostatistics faculty member at Henry Ford Health. Dr. Raman recently chaired the 2024 all-department retreat and served as the American Statistical Association’s Middle Tennessee representative to the Council of Chapters the past two years. For more about Dr. Raman’s mentoring of Dr. Joseph, see the May 2023 thank-you note from Dr. Joseph published in AmStatNews.
