Brief CommunicationAssessing the reliability of retrospective reports of adverse childhood experiences among adult HMO members attending a primary care clinic☆
Section snippets
Methods
The ACE Study is a collaboration between Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Center (HAC) in San Diego, California, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. The ACE Study was approved by the Institutional Review Boards of Kaiser Permanente, Emory University, and the Office of Protection from Research Risks, National Institutes of Health.
Characteristics of the study population
The study population included 334 (51%) women and 324 (49%) men. The mean age (±SE) was 64 (±12.0) years for women and 64 (±12.4) years for men. Eighty-two percent of the women and 79% of the men were white; 29% of the women and 45% of the men were college graduates; another 41% of the women and 39% of the men had some college education. Only 7% of the women and 6% of the men had not graduated from high school. The prevalence found for each of the adverse childhood experiences among this study
Discussion
We had the unique opportunity to examine the test-retest reliability of retrospective reports of adverse childhood experiences from a large epidemiological study. For each component question and for each category of childhood abuse and household dysfunction the kappa coefficients demonstrated good agreement as defined by Fleiss (1981) and moderate to substantial as defined by Landis and Koch (1977). The same was found for the ACE score, which has repeatedly shown a strong graded relationship to
Conclusions
In summary, we found the test-retest reliability in the responses to questions about adverse childhood experiences as well as the resulting ACE score to be good (Fleiss, 1981) and moderate to substantial (Landis & Koch, 1977). These findings suggest that retrospective responses to childhood abuse and related forms of serious household dysfunction are generally stable over time. The likely contributors to differences in reporting over time would likely bias any associations found between these
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The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study has been supported under a cooperative agreement #TS-44-10/11 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention through the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine and is currently funded by a grant from the Garfield Memorial Fund.