Children Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence: Identifying Differential Effects of Family Environment on Children's Socioemotional Functioning through Regression Mixture Models

Background: A substantial body of literature documents that exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) in childhood is associated with a host of negative developmental consequences. Research in this area has also identified several interconnected risk and protective factors that directly and indirectly contribute to heterogeneity in adjustment among children exposed to IPV. Unfortunately, the majority of studies to date have employed statistical methodologies that assume comparable effects of contextual risk and protective factors for all children. Using an innovative statistical approach, the current study examined the degree to which there are differential effects of severity of IPV exposure, yearly household income, and number of children in the family on posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTS), internalizing behaviors, and externalizing behaviors among children exposed to family violence.

Method: Participants included 290 maternal caregiver-child dyads recruited from community-based domestic violence agencies. The child sample was gender-balanced with a mean age of 9.07 (SD=1.64). The representation of racial/ethnic identities was as follows: 55.2% Latino or Hispanic, 22.1% White, 17.9% more than 1 race, 3.4% African American or Black, 1.0% American Indian, and 0.3% Asian. A regression mixture model was conducted using Mplus 7.1 software. First, differential effects of severity of IPV exposure, yearly household income, and number of children in the family on PTS symptoms and externalizing and internalizing behavior problems were tested.  Outcome means, variances, and covariances, and the effects of predictors were allowed to vary between latent classes.  After finding evidence for differential risk and protective effects, multinomial logistic regression was conducted to examine the effects of child gender, ethnicity, and maternal education on the latent moderating factor class memberships.

Results: Multiple fit indices (AIC, BIC, adjusted BIC, and BLRT) suggested the three-class solution was the optimal number of subgroups to represent children in the sample. Furthermore, the 3-class solution demonstrated a high degree of class separation; entropy was .93 and the lowest latent class probability was .95. Next, classes were interpreted based on class- specific intercepts on the outcomes, residual variances, and regression coefficients. Maladjusted children with moderate sensitivity to environmental factors characterized 24% of the sample. Ten percent of the children were highly maladjustment with high sensitivity to environmental factors. The majority of children (69%) were characterized as being asymptomatic with low sensitivity to environmental factors. Results of the multinomial logistic regression indicated that children with mothers who had higher levels of education were more likely to be in the maladjusted group with moderate sensitivity to environmental factors than the asymptomatic group (OR= 1.02, p< .05). Latino children were less likely to be in both maladjusted groups compared to the asymptomatic group (moderate sensitivity: OR= .31, p<.001; high sensitivity: OR= .17, p<.05 ).

Conclusion:  Our findings suggest differential effects of risk and protective factors among children exposed to IPV. This study adds to the growing body of literature suggesting that intervention efforts must account for diverging trajectories of internalizing-specific, externalizing-specific, and co-morbid symptomology. Implications for future research and culturally-tailored adaptive interventions for children and families impacted by IPV are discussed.