CIS Overview
The Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect (CIS) is a national initiative to collect data on children who come to the attention of a child welfare authority due to alleged or suspected abuse and/or neglect in the year the study is conducted. Prior to 1998, there were no reliable national data on the reported incidence of child abuse and neglect in Canada. The primary objective of the CIS is to provide a reliable estimate of the incidence of reported child abuse and neglect. A second objective of the CIS is to compare findings over time. As a result, data collection for the CIS is completed in five- year cycles. The first cycle of the CIS data collection was conducted in 1998 and acts as a baseline against which future cycles of the study can be compared.
The 1998, 2003, and 2008 CIS datasets provide a unique opportunity to describe changes in child maltreatment investigations across Canada over the last decade. The 2008 sample has been expanded and the changes to the procedure for classifying investigations in 2008 will allow analysts to begin to track differences between investigations of maltreatment incidents and investigations of situations reported because of risk of future maltreatment. The CIS‑2008 dataset will be made available by the Injury and Child Maltreatment Section at the Public Health Agency of Canada.
