Research

Practitioner Review: Twenty years of research with adverse childhood experience scores – Advantages, disadvantages and applications to practice

23 February 2021 3 mins read The Uk Trauma Council Health Mental health Social Care Mental Health Child Sexual Abuse & Exploitation

In their practitioner review, Lacey and Minnis consider the strengths and limitations of adverse childhood experience (ACE) scores – an increasingly common and influential approach for measuring childhood adversity in public policy, research and clinical practice.

Childhood maltreatment has an influence on how touch is perceived in adulthood. Picture: Nastya/Adobe Stock

The strength of this approach, according to the authors, lies in its wide availability, uncomplicated administration and simple understanding of the scores. Moreover, this tool has increased awareness of the link between early adversity and increased risk of a wide range of mental and physical health problems. However, the authors also highlight a number of limitations.

For example, ACE scores are largely reliant on retrospective reports, which are likely to be biased/unreliable, and assume that each subtype of early adversity has the same association with later outcomes. Also, ACE screening measures do not consider the specific patterning of ACEs (e.g. which adversities co-occur) and overall there is an unclear rationale, according to the authors, for why the 10 original ACEs categories were selected.

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