Syracuse University, NY, USA.
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
Trauma Violence Abuse. 2024 Apr;25(2):1695-1708. doi: 10.1177/15248380231192922. Epub 2023 Aug 18.
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) studies reveal the profound impacts of experiencing trauma and hardships in childhood. However, the cumulative risk approach of treating ACEs obscures the heterogeneity of ACEs and their consequences, making actionable interventions impossible. latent class analysis (LCA) has increasingly been used to address these concerns by identifying underlying subgroups of people who experience distinctive patterns of co-occurring ACEs. Though LCA has its strengths, the existing research produces few comparable findings because LCA results are dependent on ACEs measures and indicators, which vary widely by study. Therefore, a scoping review of ACEs studies using LCA that focuses on ACEs measures, indicators, and findings is needed to inform the field. Following Arksey and O'Malley's five-stage scoping review methodological framework, we first identified 211 articles from databases of EBSCOhost, PubMed, and Scopus using "adverse childhood experiences" for title search and "latent class analysis" for abstract search. Based on the inclusion criteria of peer-reviewed articles written in English published from 2012 to 2022 and the exclusion criteria of nonempirical studies and the LCA not analyzing ACEs, we finally selected 58 articles in this scoping review. Results showed LCA has been increasingly endorsed in the ACEs research community to examine the associations between ACEs and human health and well-being across culturally diverse populations. LCA overcame the limitations of the traditional methods by revealing specific ACEs clusters that exert potent effects on certain outcomes. However, the arbitrary nature of selecting ACEs indicators, measures, and the limited use of theory impedes the field from moving forward.
不良童年经历（ACEs）研究揭示了在童年经历创伤和困难的深远影响。然而，将 ACEs 视为累积风险的方法掩盖了 ACEs 的异质性及其后果，使得可采取的干预措施变得不可能。潜在类别分析（LCA）越来越多地被用来解决这些问题，方法是识别经历独特共发 ACEs 模式的人群的潜在亚组。尽管 LCA 有其优势，但现有的研究产生的可比结果很少，因为 LCA 结果取决于 ACEs 测量和指标，这些指标因研究而异。因此，需要对使用 LCA 的 ACEs 研究进行范围综述，重点关注 ACEs 测量、指标和发现，以为该领域提供信息。我们遵循 Arksey 和 O'Malley 的五阶段范围综述方法框架，首先使用标题搜索“不良童年经历”和摘要搜索“潜在类别分析”，从 EBSCOhost、PubMed 和 Scopus 的数据库中确定了 211 篇文章。根据纳入标准，即发表于 2012 年至 2022 年的同行评议的英文文章，以及排除标准，即非实证研究和未分析 ACEs 的 LCA，我们最终在这项范围综述中选择了 58 篇文章。结果表明，LCA 已在 ACEs 研究界得到越来越多的认可，用于研究 ACEs 与跨文化多样性人群的人类健康和福祉之间的关联。LCA 通过揭示对某些结果产生强大影响的特定 ACEs 集群克服了传统方法的局限性。然而，选择 ACEs 指标、测量和理论的有限使用的任意性阻碍了该领域的发展。
