Beyond Household Adverse Childhood Experiences: Applying Mixture Modeling to Investigate the Role of Community Adversity in Youth Neuropsychiatric Development

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT This study is a secondary analysis of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Our study will investigate how within-household adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) co-occur with community adversity experiences such as discrimination, and how these risks may be moderated by community strengths and protective factors to affect youth neuropsychiatric development in early adolescence. Community ACEs disproportionately affect youth who are racial/ethnic minorities, making expansion of research to be inclusive of discrimination a priority for addressing ACEs equitably. This study will examine the “classic” household ACEs and their co-occurrence with ten community ACEs in a latent class analysis: (1) bullying, (2) witnessing community violence, (3) experiencing community violence, (4) gun violence, (5) school violence, (6) cyberbullying; and discrimination due to (7) race/ethnicity, (8) nationality/family origin, (9) sexual identity (lesbian/gay/bisexual), and (10) weight/body size. We will then use latent transition analysis to identify ACE trajectories over three years and their relationship to two youth neuropsychiatric outcomes: internalizing/externalizing behavior and cognition. We will look at differences across racial/ethnic minority youth given risks of community ACEs compounded for youth who are racial/ethnic minorities and more likely to be born into disadvantaged communities due to structural racism. Latent class analysis presents a novel opportunity to analyze co-occurring ACEs in a child’s home and community environments and understand the role ACEs play in youth neuropsychiatric development, going beyond a simple count of household adversity experiences as has been done in prior research. The ABCD study is an ideal dataset to leverage to overcome methodological and conceptual limitations of prior research on ACEs that has been household-level and deficits-oriented focused: 1) It uses a national, population-based sample, allowing for generalizability; 2) it measures both household and community adversity to allow for evaluation of co-occurring experiences, particularly discrimination which has been rarely studied in relation to a comprehensive set of other ACEs; 3) it measures community strengths and protective factors; and 4) It allows for us to investigate these factors in the sensitive developmental window of early adolescence where prior ACEs research has focused on early childhood. Findings from this study will inform future projects incorporating novel neuroimaging and biospecimen data from the ABCD study to better understand the impact of community ACEs; shifting toward developing community interventions to reduce risk for negative neuropsychiatric outcomes; and leveraging the same methodology to study historical and intergenerational trauma.