Child Trauma Data Collection

Injury, disasters, violence, maltreatment, and chronic exposure to conflict or family / community violence affect tens of millions of children globally each year. After such events, traumatic stress and other psychological sequelae can have substantial impact on children’s health and wellbeing.

A growing number of studies track children after exposure to an acute trauma to better understand what drives post trauma symptoms and recovery. An increasing body of research evaluates interventions to prevent or treat the mental health consequences of trauma for children. But many child trauma studies have small samples which may limit statistical power and generalizability, and wide variation in measures makes cross-study analyses challenging.

This collection of datasets represents the work of the Child Trauma Data Archives (CTDA) project.  CTDA is an international collaborative effort to implement FAIR Data practices and to accelerate advances in child trauma research by

• bringing child trauma datasets together in a common format
• helping to preserve these data for future use
• using expert input to make data ready for integrative cross-study analyses.

The overarching aim of the CTDA project is to create a growing research resource for the child trauma field that facilitates novel cross-study analyses of individual-participant-level data. CTDA also promotes the use of common data elements and metadata across future child trauma studies to make these data more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable).

How it works:

1. Investigators around the world contribute their data to CTDA (learn more here) to help build and sustain this important resource for the field.
2. The CTDA team brings these data together in a common format with standard metadata and submits the datasets to the Child Trauma Data Collection here at ICPSR/DSDR.
3. Researchers around the world can request data to conduct new analyses.

For example, researchers (including graduate students) have combined CTDA data across 24 studies to examine sex differences in child PTSD symptoms across development, and across 16 studies to examine the association of parent and child posttraumatic stress over time.

What is in the Child Trauma Data Collection?

What types of studies? The collection includes datasets from two broad types of child trauma studies: prospective studies that follow children after an exposure to acute trauma, and intervention studies that evaluate prevention or treatment of traumatic stress in children after any type of trauma.

What types of trauma exposure? Prospective studies in the collection include children recently exposed to disaster, injury, violence, medical events, and other single-incident traumas. Intervention studies include children who experienced a range of traumas including acute events and ongoing or relational traumas such as physical or sexual abuse.

What types of data? Datasets in the collection include quantitative data, mostly collected via validated questionnaires or interviews relating to children’s psychological health and recovery, coping and social support, cognitive processes, and health or functional outcomes. Some studies also derived data from children’s health and treatment records.

How diverse are the studies and study participants?

Currently, the collection includes:

• Data from studies conducted in North America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East
• Data from trauma-exposed children ranging from early childhood through adolescence (many studies also enrolled parents)
• Some degree of cultural diversity – for example, across CTDA datasets nearly half of child participants are of minority ethnicity in the country where they live

If you have datasets to contribute to help broaden this scope, please contact the CTDA team.

How to learn more about CTDA

• Explore the CTDA website
• Review the CTDA Data Manual

Resources for FAIR Data practices and child trauma studies

• The Global Collaboration on Traumatic Stress FAIR Data Theme brings together tools, relevant data resources, and FAIR Data projects such as the CTDA project