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).