Participation of Children Involved in the Child Protection System – Validation of the Meaningful Participation Assessment Tool (MPAT)

Floor Middel*, Wendy Post, Mónica López López, Hans Grietens

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

12 Citations (Scopus)
174 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Children have the right to participate in child protection investigations. Although research suggests that participation is related to positive outcomes of children in the child protection system, children’s participation is not always facilitated in practice. Therefore, it is important to validate tools that can be used to further investigate children’s participation. We examined the psychometric properties (i.e., reliability, internal validity, and external validity) of the Meaningful Participation Assessment Tool (MPAT), which measures the degree in which child protection professionals enable children’s participation in child protection investigations. The MPAT is based on the Model of Meaningful Participation (Bouma et al. 2018) and distinguishes three domains of children’s participation in child protection: 1) informing, 2) hearing, and 3) involving in decision-making. It consists of 13 items. We validated the MPAT based on data from 292 child protection cases. We concluded that the MPAT was reliable, internally valid and externally valid. The MPAT’s reliability was reflected by substantial Cohen’s Kappa coefficients ranging from .63 to .92. The Mokken scale analysis revealed a strong scale of 8 items (H = .70, Rho = .89). Items on seeing and hearing children about child protection topics seemed relatively more easy to achieve compared to items on providing children with information, which suggests that child protection workers may struggle most with informing children. Lastly, we concluded that the MPAT might be externally valid because we found higher MPAT scores for subgroups based on child protection institution, age, and gender, which was in line with our expectations.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)713-735
Number of pages23
JournalChild indicators research
Volume14
Issue number2
Early online date16-Sept-2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Apr-2021

Keywords

  • Participation
  • Child protection investigations
  • Mokken scale analysis
  • Children's rights
  • Decision-making

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Participation of Children Involved in the Child Protection System – Validation of the Meaningful Participation Assessment Tool (MPAT)'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this