Merrick Jillian S, Labella Madelyn H, Narayan Angela J, Desjardins Christopher D, Barnes Andrew J, Masten Ann S
Department of Psychology, University of Denver, Denver, CO 80210, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA.
Children (Basel). 2020 Apr 10;7(4):33. doi: 10.3390/children7040033.
Although many existing measures tabulate specific risk factors to yield cumulative risk indices, there is a need for low-burden strategies to estimate general adversity exposure.
This study introduces a brief, new measure of lifetime adversity, the Child Life Challenges Scale (CLCS), and examines its validity in a sample of parents and children residing in emergency housing. The CLCS comprises a single global item for rating cumulative life challenges utilizing either a paper-pencil scale or a sliding scale on a tablet. Parents are provided with anchor examples of mild and extreme challenges and asked to mark a location along the scale reflecting number and severity of challenges in their children's lives to date. Study participants included 99 parents and their 3- to 6-year-old children.
CLCS scores were moderately associated with children's parent-reported total life stressors, and these associations were robust to controls for parental history of adversity, parental distress, and family demographics. Control variables also did not moderate associations between CLCS scores and total life stressors, suggesting that the CLCS functions similarly across a range of sociodemographic risk. Paper-pencil and tablet versions showed similar convergent validity.
The CLCS shows promise as an efficient measure for estimating children's lifetime adversity with minimal parent or administrator burden.
尽管许多现有措施将特定风险因素制成表格以得出累积风险指数，但仍需要低负担策略来估计总体逆境暴露情况。
本研究引入了一种简短的全新终生逆境测量方法——儿童生活挑战量表（CLCS），并在居住于应急住房的父母与孩子样本中检验其有效性。CLCS包含一个单一的总体项目，用于通过纸质量表或平板电脑上的滑动量表对累积生活挑战进行评分。为父母提供轻度和极端挑战的锚定示例，并要求他们在量表上标记一个位置，以反映到目前为止其子女生活中挑战的数量和严重程度。研究参与者包括99名父母及其3至6岁的孩子。
CLCS得分与父母报告的孩子总体生活压力源中度相关，并且这些关联在控制父母的逆境史、父母的痛苦程度和家庭人口统计学因素后依然稳健。控制变量也未调节CLCS得分与总体生活压力源之间的关联，这表明CLCS在一系列社会人口风险范围内的作用相似。纸质版和平板版显示出相似的收敛效度。
CLCS有望成为一种高效的测量方法，以最小的父母或管理人员负担来估计儿童的终生逆境。
