The following is a summary of “Unpacking the Impact of Early Adverse Childhood Experiences on Early Onset of Sexual Intercourse Among an Urban Birth Cohort of Early Adolescents,” published in the December 2023 issue of Adolescent Health by Zhang, et al.
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are a sign that a person will start having sexual relations early in life. However, not as much research has been done on the trends of ACEs found using latent class analysis (LCA) and how they relate to first sexual experiences. For a study, researchers used LCA to find ACEs profiles at age five and see if these profiles can tell us anything different about when teens will start dating.
They looked at information from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study about 3,185 people who took part, with 1,547 women and 1,638 men. It included parents or guardians reporting 10 types of ACEs when the kids were, on average, five years old and teens reporting sexual encounters before or after age 15. They used LCA to divide the subjects into subgroups and multinomial logistic regressions to see if there were changes in how early sexual start happened in the ACEs subgroups.
LCA found four groups for both men and women: low adversity (51.8%), financial adversity (32.0%), family problems (12.0%), and abuse (4.2%). They found differences in early sexual activity between people in all three adversity classes compared to people in the low adversity group based on their class participation. Pairwise comparison tests also showed that teens in the family trouble class were less likely to have their first sexual experience than teens in the abuse and financial hardship classes.
The results showed that LCA could help find important and unique patterns of child trauma while taking into account the fact that ACEs can happen together. This was especially helpful for figuring out who might be most at risk for health problems, which can lead to more effective and focused treatments.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X23003750
