Announcing the Final Examination of Josalie Condon for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the department of Sociology.
Background: Research has found that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have been shown to lead to a myriad of issues including struggling in school. The more ACEs a child experiences, the worse their outcome tends to be. However, critics of ACE research have argued that not all ACEs weight the same and intersectionality needs to be considered. Therefore, this study aims to analysis the relationship between ACEs and School outcome issues. These school outcome variables are analyzed, first with a binary ACE variable, then with ACE scale variable, to test whether more ACEs lead to worse outcomes. And, finally, the ACEs are run separately to test if they each have the same effect. An intersectional lens is used. Method: This study utilized the multiple years of the National Survey of Childrens Health (N=50,899). Multiple logistic regression was used to predict the odds of ACEs affecting the school success variables. The ACEs analyzed include material hardship, divorce, parental death, parental incarceration, witnessing intimate partner violence, being a victim of violence or seeing violence in their neighborhood, living with someone mentally ill, living with someone with a substance abuse problem, or being treated unfairly because of their race., and the school calling home. Results: Results show that having at least one ACE and the ACE scale was significantly related to all the school outcomes. Every ACE run individually in unadjusted models was significant, however, when added together into the adjusted model, many of the ACEs lost their significance. Parental incarceration remained significant for predicting repeating a grade, material hardship and divorce remained significant for struggling to complete homework, and all three of these ACEs as well as experiencing/witnessing violence led to higher odds of the school calling home. Finally, intersectionality wasn’t statistically significant, but should still be considered when advocating for change.
Committee in Charge:
Dr. Alison Cares
Dr. Scott Carter
Dr. Dawn Turnage
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