Peer-reviewed article
Participation of Children Involved in the Child Protection System – Validation of the Meaningful Participation Assessment Tool (MPAT)
Floor Middel, Wendy J. Post, Mónica López López, Hans W. E. Grietens ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study validates the Meaningful Participation Assessment Tool (MPAT), which measures how well child protection professionals enable children to participate in child protection investigations. The MPAT assesses three domains: informing children, hearing their views, and involving them in decision-making. The tool was tested on 292 child protection cases and showed good reliability and validity. The research found that child protection workers are better at hearing and seeing children than at providing them with information about what is happening.
Key points
- The MPAT measures meaningful participation across three domains: informing, hearing, and involving children in decision-making
- The tool showed substantial reliability with Cohen's Kappa coefficients ranging from 0.63 to 0.92
- A strong 8-item scale emerged from the analysis (H = 0.70, Rho = 0.89)
- Child protection workers find it easier to hear and see children than to inform them about child protection matters
- MPAT scores varied as expected across different child protection institutions, ages, and genders, supporting external validity
Limitations
The study validates a measurement tool but does not directly test whether improved participation leads to better outcomes for children. The validation is based on data from the Netherlands and Belgium only, which may limit generalizability to other contexts.
Abstract
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.