Community-wide resilience mitigates adverse childhood experiences on adult and youth health, school/work, and problem behaviors.

ABSTRACT

This study developed community-wide measures for 118 Washington State communities of levels of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and resilience, and found significant mitigating effects of resilience on community-wide levels of mental health, physical health, problem behaviors, and school/work outcomes, independent of community-wide levels of ACEs, low income, and race/ethnic composition. The data set was constructed by calculating aggregated community-level variables from measures obtained from survey responses to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for adults and the Healthy Youth Survey for youth and combining them with state archival data. Principal component factor scores were calculated for community-wide levels of individual and contextual resilience. Individual resilience included prevalence of social-emotional support, life satisfaction, and optimism. Contextual resilience included social capital factors, social cohesion and collective efficacy for adults and protective supports for youth in four domains-family/adult, peer, school, and neighborhood/community. Both contextual and individual resilience levels mitigated outcomes for adults-only contextual resilience for youth. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).