Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, 52242, USA.
Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA.
J Youth Adolesc. 2020 Jun;49(6):1292-1308. doi: 10.1007/s10964-020-01207-z. Epub 2020 Feb 20.
A large body of evidence suggests that exposure to childhood adversities increases risk for poor quality physical health in adulthood. Much of this evidence is based on retrospective measures which are believed to be contaminated by the limitations and biases of autobiographical memory. Using longitudinal data on 454 African Americans (61 percent female) this study examines the corroboration between prospective and retrospective measures of childhood adversities gathered approximately two decades apart, and the relative ability of the measures to predict self-reported illnesses and a biomarker of 30-year cardiovascular disease risk. Comparisons indicated that the retrospective and prospective measures demonstrated weak convergence and did not provide completely equivalent information about self-reported adverse childhood experiences. A series of regression models indicated that the two measures of adversities exhibited similar associations with the cardiovascular disease biomarker but divergent associations with self-reported illnesses. Furthermore, both the prospective and retrospective measures simultaneously predicted cardiovascular disease risk in adulthood. That the prospective measure did not significantly predict perceived illnesses after adjusting for the retrospective measure is evidence that childhood adversities predict self-reported health burden insofar as respondents remember those adversities as adults. The findings provide evidence that retrospective self-report measures of childhood adversities do not closely converge with prospective measures, and that retrospective measures may not provide valid estimates of the association between childhood adversities and perceived illnesses in adulthood.
大量证据表明，儿童时期遭受逆境会增加成年后患不良身体健康的风险。这些证据大多基于回顾性测量，而这些测量被认为受到自传体记忆的局限性和偏见的影响。本研究使用 454 名非裔美国人（61%为女性）的纵向数据，检验了大约相隔二十年收集的儿童逆境的前瞻性和回顾性测量之间的一致性，以及这些测量预测自我报告疾病和 30 年心血管疾病风险生物标志物的相对能力。比较表明，回顾性和前瞻性测量显示出较弱的一致性，并且不能提供关于自我报告的不良童年经历的完全相同的信息。一系列回归模型表明，逆境的两种测量方法与心血管疾病生物标志物表现出相似的关联，但与自我报告的疾病表现出不同的关联。此外，前瞻性和回顾性测量都同时预测了成年期的心血管疾病风险。在调整了回顾性测量后，前瞻性测量并没有显著预测感知疾病，这表明儿童时期的逆境在一定程度上预测了自我报告的健康负担，因为成年后的受访者会记得这些逆境。研究结果表明，儿童逆境的回顾性自我报告测量与前瞻性测量并不完全一致，并且回顾性测量可能无法提供儿童逆境与成年后感知疾病之间关联的有效估计。
