Date Awarded
2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
Department
Psychology
Advisor
Madelyn H Lebella
Committee Member
Janice Zeman
Committee Member
Meghan Quinn
Abstract
Researchers often use prospective and retrospective data to study the long-term impacts of stress, adversity, and trauma on social-emotional outcomes across the lifespan. However, few studies have investigated the unique predictive significance of prospective and retrospective reports or how both reports can be used together to examine outcomes of early life stress. The current study addresses these questions in a sample of child welfare-referred families followed from infancy to middle childhood. The current study had two aims: 1) examining how both prospective and retrospective reports of early childhood life stressors (child ACEs) jointly and independently predict children’s emotion regulation and behavior problems during middle childhood and 2) evaluating whether parental characteristics (i.e., dismissing attachment, minimizing response style, and internalizing symptoms) predict discrepancies in prospective and retrospective reports. Participants were 121 parent-child dyads (parents: 93% female, 66.9% Black/African American; children: 47.1% female, 63.6% Black/African American). who completed the middle childhood follow-up of a randomized clinical trial of parenting programs for families referred to child welfare due to concerns about maltreatment during infancy Participants reported life stressors both prospectively (through multiple questionnaires during the original RCT) and retrospectively through a Life Events Calendar completed at the middle childhood follow-up. At the bivariate level, prospective reports were significantly associated with retrospective reports, emotion dysregulation, and behavior problems; retrospective reports were significantly associated with emotion dysregulation, behavior problems, and parent-reported symptoms. Unexpectedly, neither prospective nor retrospective reports significantly predicted adaptive regulation or child-reported symptoms. In polynomial regression models, prospective and retrospective reports of ACEs interacted to predict parent-reported emotion dysregulation and total symptoms, such that prospectively identified ACEs were only predictive at above-average levels of retrospective reports. However, contrary to the secondary hypotheses, there were no significant relationships linking discrepancies in prospective versus retrospective reports to parents’ dismissing attachment, minimizing response style, or internalizing symptoms. Taken together, results suggest that early ACEs predict parent reports of emotion dysregulation and total symptoms in middle childhood, especially when both prospectively and retrospectively identified ACEs are high. In contrast, parent-reported adaptive regulation and child-reported total symptoms were not significantly associated with early adversity. Although this study did not find the expected associations linking report discrepancies to parent characteristics, it provides an important foundation for future research and clinical interpretation of parent reports of early life stress and its association with children’s social-emotional adjustment.
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-wey7-7v38
Rights
© The Author
Recommended Citation
Schulte, Madison, "Early Adversity And Middle Childhood Adjustment: Prediction From Prospective And Retrospective Reports" (2024). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1717521859.
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-wey7-7v38
