Latent Models of Child Maltreatment and Exposure to Adversity for Youth in Foster Care

• In Event: 1-108 - Toward Understanding Heterogeneity in Adolescent Trauma Experiences and Later Adjustment Outcomes

Integrative Statement

Exposure to child maltreatment is a significant public health problem. In 2016, 2.3 million children were the subject of a child abuse investigation and of those, 636,293 youth in the US had at least one substantiated exposure to child maltreatment. Approximately 22% were placed in foster care as a result of their maltreatment exposure (NCANDS, 2016). Research shows a consistent and enduring negative impact from exposure to child maltreatment on youth mental and developmental health (Jackson et al., 2017).
Children in foster care are considerably more likely than other children to experience a host of risk factors, including poverty, parental substance abuse, and significant loss and change during their early developmental years (Jackson et al., 2014). Being placed in foster care for many youth also means multiple transitions and inconsistent caregiving, which are likely to jeopardize their healthy development.
Despite the evidence that youth in foster care/exposed to maltreatment are at-risk for poor adjustment, this result is not automatic as more and more research studies show that for some youth, exposure to adversity in general and maltreatment specifically has little relation to their well-being. It is possible that this discrepancy is due in part, to the myriad of ways adversity (e.g., child maltreatment) is measured across studies, with most studies reducing this experience to a simple dichotomy of exposed or not, or to comparisons across types of abuse only. Thus, the purpose of the present work is to examine how the measurement of child maltreatment (and other adversities) influence the relation between exposure and mental and developmental health outcomes.
Using data from the SPARK project, a longitudinal study of resilience of 500 youth in foster care, the analyses show that when maltreatment is operationalized by severity or frequency, the relation to outcomes differs (e.g., severity and not frequency of maltreatment predicts externalizing behavior). Using an SEM framework, the findings indicate that for youth exposed to multiple types of mild maltreatment, the impact on mental health is fairly negligible, however, for some combinations of type and severity (severe sexual abuse), the mental health problems are high and constant over time. The data also show that for some youth exposed to multiple types of moderate maltreatment (e.g., neglect and physical abuse), and mild levels of multiple kinds of maltreatment, the result is rather high levels of adaptive behavior and only borderline levels of mental health problems. Analyses and patterns relative to non-maltreatment adversities will also be presented. The findings reflect the complexity of assessment of child maltreatment and adversity and that when the full nature of the exposure is considered, the relation to mental health is equally multi-faceted.

Author

• Yo Jackson, Pennsylvania State University
  Presenting Author