The Relationship Between Developmental Stage and Functional Impairment in Urban, Minority Youth Experiencing Complex Trauma

Children and adolescents are experiencing trauma and other adverse life experiences at an alarming rate. These experiences are marked by multiple and/or repeated offenses, often occurring within the caregiving environment. Although the nature of most trauma is cumulative and complex, trauma has widely been studied in isolation (i.e., as acute traumatic exposures), with little regard given to how developmental stage would factor into the presentation of symptoms. Moreover, urban racial/ethnic minority children make up a large portion of traumatized children, but they often are not exclusively studied in the literature with regard given to developmental stage and cumulative exposure. Consequently, in a sample of urban racial/ethnic minority children, we aimed to study the relationship between developmental stage and functional impairment, utilizing 3 childhood time points. More specifically, we sought to find whether the constellation of symptoms endorsed by children with cumulative trauma and impaired caregiving would differ based on the developmental stage of a child. Data for the current study were obtained from an existing dataset collected from 2006 to 2012. We hypothesized that a higher percentage of preschool-aged children would report affective, physiological, and attachment problems; a higher percentage of school-aged children would report attentional and behavioral dysregulation problems; a higher percentage of adolescent children would report self-concept and relational dysregulation problems. To test hypotheses, we constructed contingency tables and utilized chi-square analyses. Only reports of dysregulation within the self-concept domain aligned with hypotheses of this study. Future research might benefit from considering the influence of other potentially and more robust direct effects, such as age at exposure, current age, and characteristics of traumatic events.