NCANDS is a child-abuse-and-neglect reporting program that relies on State participation. The NCANDS was developed under the Federal Child Abuse Prevention, Adoption, and Family Services Act of 1988. Among its provisions is the requirement that the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect establish a national data collection and analysis program on child maltreatment. NCANDS has become the primary source of national information on abused and neglected children. It contains child-specific data from all investigative reports on child maltreatment submitted to State child protective service agencies. NCANDS aims to track the volume and characteristics of child maltreatment reporting. NCANDS' Child File contains case-level data on all children who have received a disposition of an investigation or assessment of allegations of maltreatment during the reporting year (calendar year 2003 for Dataset #114). Data elements include the demographics of the children and the perpetrators of their maltreatment, types of maltreatment, investigation or assessment dispositions, risk factors, and services provided as a result of the investigation or assessment. There is also a NCANDS State-level component called the Agency File, but it is not part of the collection described in this report. States voluntarily report data for NCANDS. This requires that participating States map their administrative system to the NCANDS data structure. The first two sections of the codebook list the variables in the file, and the third section describes the variables in the order in which they appear in the file.