title: Does the presence of siblings affect the results produced by a surveillance system of child mistreatment? Comparisons of several commonly-used statistical methods.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Over time, the circumstances encountered in case of child mistreatment, can be quite complex and then, can lead to methodological questions for the analysis of the data. Based on data coming from 395 children hospitalized, alone (66.1 %) or in siblings (33.9 %), in a pediatric ward between 2007 and 2012 for mistreatment or because of a severe risk of mistreatment, the aims of this paper were to quantify the degree of similarity between sibling members, to study the differences between children hospitalized alone or with siblings and to compare four statistical methods (logistic regression and GEE, both without and with robust standard error) for the analyses of the associated factors of mistreatment.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Almost all intracluster correlation coefficients were large, meaning that the sibling's members have a higher degree of similarity between them. The odds ratios were not exactly the same between the two models and the robust standard errors where almost always higher than the model-based standard errors in both logistic and GEE models leading to wider confidence intervals.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Because many of the intra-siblings correlations observed were relatively strong, the failure to take this cluster dependency into account had a substantial effect on the statistical analyses. Methods taking into account the cluster dependency are widely available in statistical software and strongly recommended.
authors.affiliation: Research Centre of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Clinical Research, School of Public Health, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. Christelle.Senterre@ulb.ac.be.
authors.forename: Christelle
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Senterre
authors.affiliation: Research Centre of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Clinical Research, School of Public Health, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. Alain.Leveque@ulb.ac.be.
authors.forename: Alain
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Levêque
authors.affiliation: SOS Enfants ULB, CHU Saint Pierre, Brussels, Belgium. Brigitte_VANTHOURNOUT@stpierre-bru.be.
authors.forename: Brigitte
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Vanthournout
authors.affiliation: Research Centre of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Clinical Research, School of Public Health, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium. Michele.Dramaix@ulb.ac.be.
authors.forename: Michèle
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dramaix
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002649:Child Abuse / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D005260:Female; D006760:Hospitalization / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006776:Hospitals, Pediatric / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D035781:Siblings