Validation of the Assessment of Parent and Child Adversity (APCA) in Mothers and Young Children

ABSTRACT

Objective

Advancing understanding of how early adversity arises, manifests, and contributes to health difficulties depends on accurate measurement of children’s experiences. In early life, exposure to adversity is often intertwined with that of one’s caregivers. We present preliminary psychometric properties of a novel measure of adversity, the Assessment of Parent and Child Adversity (APCA), which simultaneously characterizes parents’ and children’s adversity.

Methods

During pregnancy, women reported their past adverse experiences. When their children were ages 3–5 years (47% female), 97 mothers (71% White, 17% Hispanic/Latinx) completed the APCA, the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, and the Benevolent Childhood Experiences scale. They reported their current symptoms of depression and anxiety and their child’s emotional and behavioral problems. Using the APCA, we distinguished between maternal adversity during different life periods and obtained metrics of child witnessing of and direct exposure to adversity.

Results

The APCA demonstrated validity with other measures of maternal adverse experiences, maternal positive childhood experiences, and maternal symptoms of psychopathology. Children whose mothers experienced greater adversity, particularly in the prenatal period, had more emotional and behavioral problems, as did children who were directly exposed to greater adversity.

Conclusions

The APCA has good usability and validity. Leveraging the ability of the APCA to distinguish between adversity during different life stages and originating from different sources, our findings highlight potentially distinct effects of different aspects of maternal and child adversity on difficulties in maternal and child mental health.

Acknowledgments

We thank David Cole for his feedback on the statistical analysis plan for this paper. We thank Ana Campos, Jonas Miller, Daisy Feddoes, Jillian Segarra, and Ronald Wong for their assistance in recruitment, project management, and data collection, as well as the families who participated in this research.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

Data are available at https://github.com/lucysking/MoD/tree/master/king_APCA_validation.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2022.2042696.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by the Stanford Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (IHG, Transdisciplinary Initiatives Program), the Jacobs Foundation (KLH, Early Career Research Fellowship 2017-1261-05), the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (LSK, Dissertation Fellowship), Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (GMS, DKS), the March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center at Stanford University (GMS, DKS), the Christopher Hess Research Fund (DKS), the Charles B. and Ann L. Johnson Endowed Fund (DKS), the Prematurity Research Fund (DKS), and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (LSK, F32HD105385).