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3230.0 - Sex differences in the association between adverse childhood experiences and cognitive, behavioral, and affective student engagement
Jorge Vigil, MPHc., Abnous Shahverdi, MPH, Kim Rogers and Myriam Forster, PhD, MPH
Background:
Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are traumatic stressors that have garnered increasing attention in education research. However, despite evidence that adolescent school engagement rates have declined in recent years and that ACE can significantly influence student outcomes, the role of ACE in student engagement and potential sex differences in this relationship remains underexplored. To fill this gap, this study investigates sex differences in the ACE - behavioral, affective, and cognitive engagement association.
Methods
: Data (N=1,221) are baseline responses from students enrolled in a longitudinal study investigating social and environmental risk factors for school and health outcomes. Regression models tested the hypothesized association between cumulative ACE and students’ behavioral, affective, and cognitive engagement and explored whether sex moderated the ACE-engagement relationship. All models adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, family composition, and state.
Results
: The sample was ethnically diverse: Non-Hispanic White (26%), African American/Black (40%), Asian/API/AN (6%), Hispanic (20%), and Multiethnic (8%), evenly
divided by sex (54% female), and had an average 15 (SD=1.82) years old. Over half of respondents (60%) reported at least one ACE. Every additional ACE was associated with lower affective (β = -0.50, SE=0.14), behavioral (β = -.24, SE=.06), and cognitive (β = -.50, SE=.14) engagement with ACE exposed males scoring lower on all three engagement domains than ACE exposed females (ps < .05).
Conclusion:
Our findings suggest that ACE are a key factor in school engagement potentially setting the stage for poor educational, economic, and health outcomes over the life course. Implications for prevention are discussed.
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