What do child maltreatment reports to child protective services tell us about the needs families and communities are experiencing?

•Over 3,000 child maltreatment intake reports (accepted and screened out) from a local social services agency were used to create a comprehensive coding framework to better describe and classify child maltreatment.•Quantifies detailed maltreatment experiences within the context of varied subtypes of abuse and neglect and associated contributory and protective factors.•Improper discipline/physical abuse was the most common maltreatment subtype. Salient risk factors included caregiver drug use and domestic violence.•Substantialdiscrepancieswere not foundbetween screened-in and screened-out caseswith respect tomaltreatment types,maltreatment type-specific codes, or contributory factors, yet they were found for reporter typeand child age.•This framework could lead to better intake screening tools and data tracking systems to provide communities with reliable data regarding the needs of the families they encounter so they can respond with targeted intervention and prevention services to reduce and prevent child maltreatment. Intake reports from child protective service (CPS) agencies are the foundation for subsequent decisions and services within the child welfare system. They provide valuable information for understanding children’s needs, yet the unstructured way that information is captured makes the information ascertained in these reports difficult to summarize. Utilizing CPS intake reports from a mid-sized urban county in the southeastern United States (N = 2,724), our study had three aims: (1) develop a coding system to abstract information from narrative CPS intake reports, (2) examine the prevalence of maltreatment subtypes, and (3) compare prevalence of maltreatment subtypes by screen-in/screen-out decisions. Improper discipline/physical abuse was the most common maltreatment subtype (34.6 %); over 40 % of reports involved a physical act toward the child not resulting in injury. Salient risk factors included caregiver drug use (20.6 %) and domestic violence (19 %). While substantialdiscrepancieswere not foundbetween screened-in and screened-out caseswith respect tomaltreatment types,maltreatment type-specific codes, or contributory factors, they were found for reporter typeand child age. Our coding system to extract and assess child maltreatment intake narrative data can provide local agencies with descriptive information about why children come to their agency’s attention and provide nuanced details regarding the children’s and families’ needs. This