The Effects of Cumulative Violence Exposure Clusters on Adolescent Mothers' School Participation: Examining Attention and Behavior Problems As Mediators

Background and Purpose: While researchers have studied individual types of violence exposure among youths, including community violence, physical abuse by a caregiver, witnessing intimate partner violence (IPV), and sexual victimization, attention has recently turned to examining cumulative violence. Among adolescents who are poor, female, and residing in urban areas, cumulative violence exposure is common. As these experiences accumulate throughout childhood, they are associated with negative outcomes such as attention and behavior problems in school and poor school participation. In exploring these relationships, researchers have typically taken an additive approach using main effects models (e.g., two types of victimization as predictors of academic outcomes). We go beyond this by first identifying clusters of cumulative violence exposure, then examining the relationships between clusters and school participation as mediated by attention and behavior problems in school, within a sample of adolescent mothers. We address the following research questions: What are the associations between clusters of childhood cumulative violence exposure, attention and behavior problems in school, and school participation? 2) To what extent do attention and behavior problems explain the relationship between patterns of cumulative violence exposure and school participation?

Methods: Participants (N = 205) were recruited from three community sites that serve pregnant or parenting adolescents and surveyed about their childhood experiences with community violence exposure (Richters and Martinez’s Things I Have Seen and Heard Scale), physical abuse by a caregiver, witnessing IPV (both assessed with Revised Conflict Tactics Scale [CTS 2]), and sexual victimization (Russell’s child sexual abuse framework); attention and behavior problems in school (both assessed with Achenbach’s Youth Self Report sub-scales); and school participation (composite made up of currently in school or graduated, any history of suspension/expulsion or dropout). Using the four childhood violence variables, we used Ward’s method of hierarchical agglomerative clustering followed by K-means cluster analysis to identify five cluster profiles: HiAll (high violence across all four types), HiAllbutSxV (high community violence, physical abuse by a caregiver, and witnessing IPV, with low sexual victimization), HiWIPV (high witnessing IPV), HiSV (high sexual victimization), and LoAll (low violence across all four types). We used Mplus 6 to conduct path analysis and estimate the indirect, direct, and total effects.

Results: There were significant differences by cluster in attention problems, F(4, 205) = 7.10, p < .001, behavior problems, F(4, 205) = 8.10, p < .001, and school participation, F(4, 205) = 4.36, p < .01. In general, HiAll had significantly higher levels of attention and behavior problems, as well as lower school participation, in comparison to the LoAll cluster. Four clusters had significant indirect effects pathways to school participation when compared to LoAll, with behavior problems emerging as a key mediator.

Conclusions: In order to better understand how violence shapes poor academic outcomes among high-risk adolescents, we must identify distinct profiles of cumulative violence exposure rather than simply counting forms of victimization. Among adolescent mothers who have experienced high levels of family and community violence, behavior problems in school may be a key mechanism for explaining poor school participation.