He Problem of Child Abuse

Social scientists study the backgrounds of children who have been assigned to foster care. They discover that the majority of children who receive foster care have experienced physical punishment methods in their prior homes that would be severe enough to qualify as abusive.

This is a correlational study

Explanation:

A correlation study is a form of study design in which a researcher attempts to comprehend the kind of relations that occur naturally with each other. Correlational research attempts simply to determine whether and in what way two or more variables are connected.