The social epidemiology of adverse childhood experiences

Research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their role in adult health problems has grown exponentially since the original ACEs Study in the 1990s, yet largely independently from sociological inquiries. Although the original 10-item measure included some important forms of adversity, it was constructed without attention to potential social status variations and lacked many important domains of stressful experience. To improve upon earlier research, we use a representative pooled sample of children and youth, ages 2-17, collected from three National Surveys of Children's Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) to examine social status differences in the prevalence of 39 types of childhood stressors across 11 domains of adversity. Results show significant differences in exposure across gender, race/ethnicity, and parent education to several domains and individual types of non-victimization and victimization forms of ACEs, as well as cumulative ACEs counts. Implications for research on ACEs and mental health and next steps are outlined.