| Summary: | The two main aims for the review were to assess evidence on whether parental imprisonment is a risk factor for undesirable child outcomes and to assess evidence on whether parental imprisonment is a causal risk factor. A third aim of the review was to investigate whether associations between parental imprisonment and child outcomes differ according to child, parent, and environmental characteristics. Between June and September 2008, researchers searched for studies that met the eligibility criteria. Several strategies were used to conduct an exhaustive search for eligible studies. Researchers started with an existing set of documents collected by Joseph Murray during his previous research on the effects of parental imprisonment on children and then used three methods to search for additional studies. First, researchers searched 23 electronic databases for the years 1960-2008. The same keywords were used to search each database. Second, researchers examined bibliographies of previous reviews of studies on the effects of parental imprisonment on children. Third, researchers contacted experts in the field. Two groups of researchers and practitioners were emailed and asked to inform researchers of any studies they thought might be eligible for the review. The 16 studies included in the review were coded for the following key features: reference information, sample characteristics, details about the measure of parental imprisonment, details of subsamples, and multiple comparisons made in the study, details of the comparison group(s) used to derive effect sizes, types of outcome measured, and measurement details, methods used to control for confounding variables to estimate causal effects, methodological quality of the study for drawing conclusions about risk factors and causal risk factors, and statistical information used to derive an effect size.
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