Attachment as a mediator between community violence and posttraumatic stress symptoms among adolescents with a history of maltreatment☆
Section snippets
Participants
Participants in the current sample consisted of adolescents re-recruited from a sample of preadolescent physically abused and matched non-maltreated children. The original sample included 100 physically abused urban schoolchildren, ages 9–12 years (M = 10.5, SD = 0.96) in grades 4–6, and 100 non-abused classmates matched case by case for gender, age, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The original abuse sample were all confirmed cases of physical abuse consecutively registered on the New
Results
Participants in the non-abused group were exposed to an average of 12.27 (SD = 7.59) violent events in their communities, while participants in the abused group were exposed to an average of 14.43 (SD = 7.39) violent events in their communities. Adolescents with a history of maltreatment reported higher PTSS (M = 22.19, SD = 17.31) and lower attachment scores (M = 3.44, SD = .90) than adolescents without a history of maltreatment (M = 17.39, SD = 13.49; M = 3.76, SD = .68). To test the first hypothesis, that there
Discussion
The current study explored the role of attachment in the pathway from exposure to community violence to posttraumatic stress symptoms in a group of adolescents with and without a history of maltreatment. Consistent with previous research suggesting an additive effect of exposure to multiple forms of violence (Cecil et al., 2014, Garrido et al., 2010, Lynch and Cicchetti, 1998), adolescents exposed to community violence with a history of childhood physical abuse had higher rates of PTSS than
Acknowledgements
The data used in this publication were made available by the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and have been used with permission. Data from Adolescent Outcome of Physically Abused Schoolchildren were originally collected by Suzanne Salzinger, Richard Feldman, and Daisy S. Ng-Mak. The collector of the original data, the funder, NDACAN, Cornell University and their agents or employees bear no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations
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Funding for this project was provided by the National Institute of Mental Health (Award Number: R01 MH048917 05-08).