The effects of multidimensional treatment foster care for maltreated children and adolescents: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A significant proportion of youth in foster care have a history of child maltreatment (CM) exposure, which contributes to their elevated risk for experiencing emotional and behavioural disorders. To update a previously published systematic review and meta-analysis examining the effects of Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC) on the well-being of maltreated youth in foster care. Children between 3-17 years of age exposed to any type of CM by their birth parents. Systematic searches across five databases retrieved randomized controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating the impact of MTFC. We assessed risk of bias using the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool and certainty of the evidence using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations approach. Eight RCTs were included. Meta-analyses indicated that MTFC may have little to no greater effect on internalizing symptoms at 5-6 months but may slightly reduce externalizing symptoms at 3-12 months compared to usual care. MTFC’s long-term effects on these outcomes is still uncertain. There is very little and uncertain evidence regarding the difference in effects of MTFC compared to usual care interventions on suicide attempts or ideation, involvement with authority, and positive parent-child interactions. MTFC may have no additional benefits for children exposed to maltreatment. Decision makers must balance these findings with costs, resources, and training required to provide MTFC to this population compared to usual care. Quality RCTs that measure long-term outcomes, and which integrate the perspectives of children who receive MTFC, are needed. • Certainty in evidence for MTFC for youth exposed to maltreatment remains low. • MTFC may not improve youth well-being more than usual care. • Randomized controlled trials measuring long-term outcomes are needed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".