Dr. Kristi Williams, Department of Sociology,
Rank at time of award: Professor
Abstract
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) is a measurement designed to comprehensively classify experiences of abuse, neglect, and traumatic experiences that occur before 18 years of age. The original Kaiser-ACE study of 17,000 respondents, undertaken between 1995 and 1997 demonstrated a very high trauma prevalence in which only 36% of respondents reported no ACEs and 26% reported one instance, 16% reported two, 9.5% reported three, and 12.5% reported four or more (Felitti et al., 1998). More recent estimates find indicate that almost 60% of U.S. respondents report experiencing trauma in childhood (Merrick et al, 2019). Clearly, trauma is part-and-parcel of childhood in the United States, with far reaching consequences for health and well-being across the life course and across generations. Because ACEs research emerged directly from a public health and biomedical framework, research on their consequences has heavily focused on later life health, morbidity, and mortality. The result is that we know very little about how ACEs influence key developmental processes across the life course and whether or how these traumatic experiences reverberate to affect the next generation.
The proposed project will advance the ACEs literature by drawing on more than 35 years of longitudinal data from a nationally sample of mothers and their children (NLSY79) to estimate the effect of maternal ACEs exposure on the ACEs exposure of their children. Though numerous studies document an intergenerational link between exposure to specific forms of trauma (e.g., cycle of abuse) (Madigan et al. 2019), the ACEs framework is unique in demonstrating a dose- response or graded relationship with a wide range of health and well-being outcomes throughout life. This distinction is important because the prevalence of exposure to ACEs in the population is much greater than the prevalence of any one specific form of trauma. Moreover, because exposure to 4 or more ACEs is associated with particularly negative outcomes for adult well-being, compound trauma may be especially likely to be transmitted to the next generation. A related contribution of our project is identifying pathways of resilience of vulnerability to the intergenerational cycle of ACEs exposure.