Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Child Abuse & Neglect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/chiabuneg Research article Outcomes related to adverse childhood experiences in college students: Comparing latent class analysis and cumulative risk Addie N. Merians a , Majel R. Baker a , Patricia Frazier a, ⁎ , Katherine Lust b a Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, United States b Boynton Health, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Adverse childhood experiences Latent class analysis Cumulative risk Mental health College students ABSTRACT The aims of this study were to identify latent classes of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in a large sample of college students (N = 8997), investigate the relations between ACEs classes and life functioning, and compare results using latent class analysis to analyses using cumulative risk scores. Nine types of ACEs were assessed (three types of child abuse and six types of household dysfunction). Outcomes were self-report measures of mental health, physical health, alcohol consequences, and academic performance. Latent class analysis (LCA) results indicated that four classes fit the data best across random halves of the sample and were labeled High ACEs, Moderate Risk of Non-Violent Household Dysfunction, Emotional and Physical Child Abuse, and Low ACEs. Comparing across latent classes, the largest differences in outcomes were between the High ACEs and Low ACEs classes. There were no differences in outcomes between the Moderate Risk of Non-Violent Household Dysfunction and Emotional and Physical Child Abuse classes. The largest between-class differences were found for mental health and the smallest differences were found for academic performance. Comparing results using LCA latent classes and cumulative ACEs scores, the differences between the High and Low ACEs latent classes were similar to the differences between those with zero ACEs and those with 5 or more ACEs. Both approaches also accounted for roughly equivalent amounts of variance in all outcomes. Thus, latent class and cumulative risk analyses provided similar results with regard to predicting outcomes of interest among college students. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), which include physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and household dysfunction (e.g., household mental illness, witnessing family violence), are unfortunately common. In a landmark study, more than 50% of partici- pants in a large community sample endorsed at least one ACE (Felitti et al., 1998). A great deal of research also suggests that exposure to ACEs is linked to negative outcomes later in life (e.g., Reuben et al., 2016). Much of the research on ACEs has examined either the cumulative number of ACEs reported or specific types of ACEs (e.g., childhood sexual abuse). However, previous researchers have argued that ACEs co-occur in distinguishable clusters discoverable through latent class analysis (LCA), and that modeling this co- occurrence is necessary to fully understand the relation between exposure to ACEs and later well-being (Schilling et al., 2016). We first briefly review research on ACEs and later functioning, including studies that analyze the number of ACEs experienced and those that use LCA to investigate patterns of exposure to ACEs. We then use LCA to investigate how ACEs cluster together in a college student sample and compare these latent classes in terms of outcomes important to students, including mental health, physical health, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2018.07.020 Received 20 May 2017; Received in revised form 25 April 2018; Accepted 16 July 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 75 East River Road, N218, Minneapolis, MN 55455, United States. E-mail address: pfraz@umn.edu (P. Frazier). Child Abuse & Neglect xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0145-2134/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Merians, A.N., Child Abuse & Neglect (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2018.07.020