Repeated Lifetime Traumatic Events

• Activity Number: 126
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 1, 2011 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Health Policy Statistics
• Author(s): Haekyung Jeon-Slaughter*+ and Carol S. North and Phebe M. Tucker and Betty Pfefferbaum
• Companies: The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and VA North Texas Health Care System/The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
• Keywords: Repeated events ; Traumatic events ; Stochastic process

Abstract

Anyone could experience multiple traumatic events during the life course. However, these seemingly independent events occur to certain people repeatedly and sometimes too often. Our study investigates whether these seeming uncorrelated traumatic events are actually correlated or dependent each other, whether environmental factors explain frequencies of traumatic experiences, and whether first time traumatic event experience increases risk of multiple traumatic event experience later. The lifetime traumatic events are death or threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, and actual or threatened sexual violation.This study applies existing stochastic process models to test our study questions using three data sets and they are National Comorbidity Survey-Replication collected data from U.S. general population, 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing Survivors data collected from the specific population who experienced a truly random traumatic event, and Hurricane Katrina evacuee data collected from the population at risk who experienced a predicted traumatic event. The findings support low income and minority population being at high risk of multiple lifetime traumatic experiences.