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Adverse childhood experiences and workplace trauma exposure are associated with poor health. However, their differential impacts by gender are difficult to assess in studies of organizations with gender imbalances (e.g., law enforcement officers are more likely men whereas social workers are more likely women). Using a community-based participatory research framework, this study examines trauma exposure, mental and physical health, and substance use in an occupationally diverse sample (n = 391). Trauma exposure was high and associated with poor health. Even though women experienced more adversity, they were often more resilient than men. Implications for trauma-informed workplaces are discussed.

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Organizational context (e.g., criminal justice, community-based, and healthcare) and job type (e.g., police, social workers, and healthcare providers) may impact the extent of occupation-based secondary trauma (OBST). Survey data collected from a multiphase community-based participatory research project were analyzed from a variety of professionals, who were likely to "encounter the consequences of traumatic events as part of their professional responsibilities" (n = 391, women = 55%, White = 92%). Results document high trauma exposure (adverse childhood experiences [ACEs] and workplace) and OBST-related outcomes (Maslach Burnout Inventory, Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale, post-traumatic stress disorder symptom checklist for DSM-5) for the entire sample with important differences across organizational context and job type. Using multivariate regression, the strongest determinants of suffering, however, were not related to a provider's specific profession but to their number of years on the job and their ACEs (e.g., adjusted R2 = 0.23, b = 2.01, p < .001). Likewise, the most protective factors were not profession specific but rather the provider's age and perceived effectiveness of OBST-related training (e.g., b = 2.26, p < .001). These findings inform intervention development and have implications for rural and other often under-resourced areas, where the same OBST-related intervention could potentially serve many different types of providers and organizations.

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How can victim service providers, the organizations they work for, and the communities they serve help respond to the issue of occupation-based secondary trauma? Over the last few years, federal agencies in the United States have spent millions in research and programming to answer this important scientific and policy question. The current study builds on this work by describing and evaluating a community-based participatory research project focused on finding manageable, effective, sustainable, and ethical ways to respond to occupation-based secondary trauma in two separate communities: a rural American Indian community, Blackfeet Tribal Nation, and a predominantly white county in Montana, Gallatin County, United States. Findings from evaluation questionnaires (n=178; 80.10% women; 64.60% American Indian; 29.14% White) representing a wide range of occupations document that: (1) the implementation of the project was successful; (2) toolkits created for the project were useful to both individual participants and organizations; (3) training outcomes improved significantly; and (4) findings were consistent across the two different community contexts. Contributions, lessons learned, and future directions are discussed.

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A burgeoning body of scholarship is attempting to understand, normalize, and ameliorate the emotional strain of victim service provision. The literature, however, has yet to fully theorize the hazardous process of empathetic engagement with victims. As a result, concepts, mechanisms, and outcomes are often conflated, making it difficult to understand the etiological path of this occupational risk. The goal of this article is to attend to this gap by accomplishing three objectives. The first is to engage with the perspective of symbolic interaction to theoretically ground a conceptual model of secondary trauma. The second objective is to propose a model of secondary trauma that acknowledges its inherently interactional, interpretive, and, thus, vicariously transmissible nature. The third objective is to begin the work of empirically supporting this model with data from a sample of victim service providers (n = 94) collected using in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnographic participant observation, and community-based participatory research. Our findings suggest that victim service provision, in the form of empathetic engagement, can blur the boundary between self and other, and lead to a sense of damage in the self that manifests in unreliable self-agency, untrustworthy coherence of other, desensitized self-affectivity, and fractured self-history. This work has significant implications. We illustrate an important paradox by showing how victim service provision can be helpful to victims but harmful to providers. We also offer a pathway for reducing this harm. By specifying mechanisms of damage, the model can be used to inform policies and practices supportive of victim service providers' health and well-being.

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This study examines the physical health, emotional well-being, and problem behavior outcomes associated with intimate partner abuse (IPA) victimization and perpetration experiences by analyzing a nationally representative, prospective, and longitudinal sample of 879 men and women collected from the National Youth Survey Family Study (NYSFS) and assessed across a period of 9 years from 1993 to 2003. Using multivariate regression techniques, it was found that both men and women experience numerous negative outcomes associated with their IPA victimization and perpetration experiences. Implications of these findings are discussed, as are the study's limitations, and future research directions.

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The objective of this study is to examine continuity of intimate partner aggression (IPA), which is defined as repeated annual involvement in IPA, across respondents' life course and into the next generation, where it may emerge among adult children. A national, longitudinal, and multigenerational sample of 1,401 individuals and their adult children is analyzed. Annual data on IPA severity and physical injury were collected by the National Youth Survey Family Study across a 20-year period from 1984 to 2004. Three hypotheses and biological sex differences are tested and effect sizes are estimated. First, findings reveal evidence for life course continuity (IPA is a strong predictor of subsequent IPA), but the overall trend decreases over time. Second, intergenerational continuity is documented (parents' IPA predicts adult children's IPA), but the effect is stronger for female than for male adult children. Third, results from combined and separate, more restrictive, measures of victimization and perpetration are nearly identical except in the intergenerational analyses. Fourth, evidence for continuity is not found when assessing physical injury alone. Together, these findings imply that some but not all forms of IPA are common, continuous, and intergenerational. Life course continuity appears stronger than intergenerational continuity.

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This paper examines the interaction between social control and social risk mechanisms and genes within the dopaminergic system (DAT1 and DRD2) as related to serious and violent forms of delinquent behavior among adolescents and young adults. We use nine waves of data from the National Youth Survey Family Study to examine the relevance of protective or risky social factors at four social levels including school, neighborhood, friends, and family within the gene-environment interaction framework. We extend previous work in this area by providing a testable typology of gene-environment interactions derived from current theories in this area. We find consistent evidence that the associations between putatively risky genotypes and delinquent behavior are suppressed within protective social environments. We also provide some evidence that supports the differential susceptibility hypothesis for these outcomes. Our findings largely confirm the conclusions of previous work and continue to highlight the critical role of the social environment within candidate gene studies of complex behaviors.

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This study examines the intra- and intergenerational links between intimate partner violence (IPV) and animal abuse by analyzing a national, longitudinal, and multigenerational sample of 1,614 individuals collected by the National Youth Survey Family Study from 1990 to 2004. Using multilevel random-intercept regression modeling, parents' own history of animal abuse is predictive of their later involvement in IPV perpetration and victimization, net of important controls. In turn, parents' IPV violent perpetration (but not violent victimization) is predictive of their children's history of animal abuse-measured 14 years later. Intergenerational continuity of animal abuse, however, is not significant. Implications of these findings are discussed, as are the study's limitations, and future research directions.

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Guided by rigorous methodology and a life-course perspective, the goal of this research is to address a gap in current knowledge on whether, when, and how strongly intergenerational continuity of substance use exists when examining age-equivalent and developmentally specific stages of the life course. Annual self-reported substance use measures were analyzed from a prospective, longitudinal, and nationally representative sample that originally consisted of 1,725 respondents and their families, who were then interviewed over a 27-year period from 1977 to 2004. Findings from multilevel random-intercept regression models provide support for intergenerational continuity when substance use occurs in emerging adulthood but not when limited to adolescence. Implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

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In this article, the authors critically review the literature testing the cycle of maltreatment hypothesis which posits continuity in maltreatment across adjacent generations. That is, the authors examine whether a history of maltreatment victimization is a significant risk factor for the later perpetration of maltreatment. The authors begin by establishing 11 methodological criteria that studies testing this hypothesis should meet. They include such basic standards as using representative samples, valid and reliable measures, prospective designs, and different reporters for each generation. The authors identify 47 studies that investigated this issue and then evaluate them with regard to the 11 methodological criteria. Overall, most of these studies report findings consistent with the cycle of maltreatment hypothesis. Unfortunately, at the same time, few of them satisfy the basic methodological criteria that the authors established; indeed, even the stronger studies in this area only meet about half of them. Moreover, the methodologically stronger studies present mixed support for the hypothesis. As a result, the positive association often reported in the literature appears to be based largely on the methodologically weaker designs. Based on this systematic methodological review, the authors conclude that this small and methodologically weak body of literature does not provide a definitive test of the cycle of maltreatment hypothesis. The authors conclude that it is imperative to develop more robust and methodologically adequate assessments of this hypothesis to more accurately inform the development of prevention and treatment programs.

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Over the past 5 years, a great deal of attention has been paid to the development of early warning systems for dropout prevention. These warning systems use a set of indicators based on official school records to identify youth at risk for dropout and then appropriately target intervention. The current study builds on this work by assessing the extent to which a school disengagement warning index predicts not only dropout but also other problem behaviors during middle adolescence, late adolescence, and early adulthood. Data from the Rochester Youth Development Study (N = 911, 73% male, 68% African American, and 17% Latino) were used to examine the effects of a school disengagement warning index based on official 8th and 9th grade school records on subsequent dropout, as well as serious delinquency, official offending, and problem substance use during middle adolescence, late adolescence, and early adulthood. Results indicate that the school disengagement warning index is robustly related to dropout as well as serious problem behaviors across the three developmental stages, even after controlling for important potential confounders. High school dropout mediates the effect of the warning index on serious problem behaviors in early adulthood.

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