# Beyond Household Adverse Childhood Experiences: Applying Mixture Modeling to Investigate the Role of Community Adversity in Youth Neuropsychiatric Development

> **NIH NIH R21** · UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES · 2023 · $204,613

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT
This study is a secondary analysis of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Our study
will investigate how within-household adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) co-occur with community
adversity experiences such as discrimination, and how these risks may be moderated by community strengths
and protective factors to affect youth neuropsychiatric development in early adolescence. Community ACEs
disproportionately affect youth who are racial/ethnic minorities, making expansion of research to be inclusive of
discrimination a priority for addressing ACEs equitably. This study will examine the “classic” household ACEs
and their co-occurrence with ten community ACEs in a latent class analysis: (1) bullying, (2) witnessing
community violence, (3) experiencing community violence, (4) gun violence, (5) school violence, (6)
cyberbullying; and discrimination due to (7) race/ethnicity, (8) nationality/family origin, (9) sexual identity
(lesbian/gay/bisexual), and (10) weight/body size. We will then use latent transition analysis to identify ACE
trajectories over three years and their relationship to two youth neuropsychiatric outcomes:
internalizing/externalizing behavior and cognition. We will look at differences across racial/ethnic minority youth
given risks of community ACEs compounded for youth who are racial/ethnic minorities and more likely to be
born into disadvantaged communities due to structural racism. Latent class analysis presents a novel
opportunity to analyze co-occurring ACEs in a child’s home and community environments and understand the
role ACEs play in youth neuropsychiatric development, going beyond a simple count of household adversity
experiences as has been done in prior research. The ABCD study is an ideal dataset to leverage to overcome
methodological and conceptual limitations of prior research on ACEs that has been household-level and
deficits-oriented focused: 1) It uses a national, population-based sample, allowing for generalizability; 2) it
measures both household and community adversity to allow for evaluation of co-occurring experiences,
particularly discrimination which has been rarely studied in relation to a comprehensive set of other ACEs; 3) it
measures community strengths and protective factors; and 4) It allows for us to investigate these factors in the
sensitive developmental window of early adolescence where prior ACEs research has focused on early
childhood. Findings from this study will inform future projects incorporating novel neuroimaging and
biospecimen data from the ABCD study to better understand the impact of community ACEs; shifting toward
developing community interventions to reduce risk for negative neuropsychiatric outcomes; and leveraging the
same methodology to study historical and intergenerational trauma.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10710403
- **Project number:** 5R21MD017499-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES
- **Principal Investigator:** Kristen Rae Choi
- **Activity code:** R21 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2023
- **Award amount:** $204,613
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2022-09-27 → 2025-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10710403

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10710403, Beyond Household Adverse Childhood Experiences: Applying Mixture Modeling to Investigate the Role of Community Adversity in Youth Neuropsychiatric Development (5R21MD017499-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10710403. Licensed CC0.

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