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The Relevance of the Adverse Childhood Experience International Questionnaire to Working Children: Knowledge Gaps and Implications for Policy Makers

(1) Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are a global challenge, prioritized in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The ACE questionnaire is widely adopted in the USA as a tool for measuring population-level trends, such as negative health, behavioral, and economic outcomes. Intuitivel...

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Autor principal: Rutter, Alice
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8534445/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34682162
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/children8100897
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author Rutter, Alice
author_facet Rutter, Alice
author_sort Rutter, Alice
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description (1) Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are a global challenge, prioritized in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The ACE questionnaire is widely adopted in the USA as a tool for measuring population-level trends, such as negative health, behavioral, and economic outcomes. Intuitively, children in resource-scarce settings are exposed to higher levels of trauma. To understand the global picture, the World Health Organization (WHO) adapted the ACE international questionnaire (ACE-IQ), to inform policy and target interventions. However, evaluation of whether the ACE-IQ captures the experiences of around 160 million working children remains limited. (2) I applied the ACE-IQ scoring tools to detailed case studies of working children, comparing issues highlighted by holistic assessment to those captured by the ACE-IQ. (3) The ACE-IQ struggles to capture nuance across cultural contexts. As a consequence, application of the ACE-IQ as a policy tool risks “policy failure”. The tool reflects prevalent Western concerns, such as school attendance and parental supervision, but global concerns affecting working children such as forced economic migration and famine are neglected. This limitation produces “policy myopia”, sidelining certain global challenges. (4) The ACE-IQ is a useful public health tool, increasingly used to define policy goals. However, given the limitations of the ACE-IQ, the consequences of prioritizing these particular policy goals need to be actively acknowledged and mitigated.
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spelling pubmed-85344452021-10-23 The Relevance of the Adverse Childhood Experience International Questionnaire to Working Children: Knowledge Gaps and Implications for Policy Makers Rutter, Alice Children (Basel) Article (1) Adverse childhood experiences (ACE) are a global challenge, prioritized in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The ACE questionnaire is widely adopted in the USA as a tool for measuring population-level trends, such as negative health, behavioral, and economic outcomes. Intuitively, children in resource-scarce settings are exposed to higher levels of trauma. To understand the global picture, the World Health Organization (WHO) adapted the ACE international questionnaire (ACE-IQ), to inform policy and target interventions. However, evaluation of whether the ACE-IQ captures the experiences of around 160 million working children remains limited. (2) I applied the ACE-IQ scoring tools to detailed case studies of working children, comparing issues highlighted by holistic assessment to those captured by the ACE-IQ. (3) The ACE-IQ struggles to capture nuance across cultural contexts. As a consequence, application of the ACE-IQ as a policy tool risks “policy failure”. The tool reflects prevalent Western concerns, such as school attendance and parental supervision, but global concerns affecting working children such as forced economic migration and famine are neglected. This limitation produces “policy myopia”, sidelining certain global challenges. (4) The ACE-IQ is a useful public health tool, increasingly used to define policy goals. However, given the limitations of the ACE-IQ, the consequences of prioritizing these particular policy goals need to be actively acknowledged and mitigated. MDPI 2021-10-09 /pmc/articles/PMC8534445/ /pubmed/34682162 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/children8100897 Text en © 2021 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Rutter, Alice
The Relevance of the Adverse Childhood Experience International Questionnaire to Working Children: Knowledge Gaps and Implications for Policy Makers
title The Relevance of the Adverse Childhood Experience International Questionnaire to Working Children: Knowledge Gaps and Implications for Policy Makers
title_full The Relevance of the Adverse Childhood Experience International Questionnaire to Working Children: Knowledge Gaps and Implications for Policy Makers
title_fullStr The Relevance of the Adverse Childhood Experience International Questionnaire to Working Children: Knowledge Gaps and Implications for Policy Makers
title_full_unstemmed The Relevance of the Adverse Childhood Experience International Questionnaire to Working Children: Knowledge Gaps and Implications for Policy Makers
title_short The Relevance of the Adverse Childhood Experience International Questionnaire to Working Children: Knowledge Gaps and Implications for Policy Makers
title_sort relevance of the adverse childhood experience international questionnaire to working children: knowledge gaps and implications for policy makers
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8534445/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34682162
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/children8100897
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