Xiafei Wang, the HEART lab Assistant Director and Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of Kentucky recently published a paper in the Journal of Early Adolescence, along with coauthors Kirstin Clear and Sara Vasilenko. This paper focuses on uncovering patterns of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in 9-11 year-old adolescents, and then examining how these patterns were associated with early sexual and romantic behaviors at ages 11-13. In this paper, we uncovered six distinct subgroups marked by different combinations of ACEs, and then found that odds of engaging in early sexual behaviors differed by types of ACEs. In particular, classes marked by parental dysfunction (e.g., mental health issues, substance use, and criminal justice involvement) were associated the highest odds of early kissing, sexual touching, and romantic relationships. This paper is one of the first to use latent class analysis on data on ACEs from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development study, which allows us to understand the impact of different combinations of ACEs on outcomes. In addition, it is one of the few studies focused on predicting early non-coital behaviors.
Read the paper here.
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