General risk or individual vulnerability? Individual differences in young adults' health risk behaviour after childhood trauma

Abstract

The present study aims at replicating earlier findings regarding the link between childhood trauma and young adults' health risk behaviours and extends previous work by examining potential moderating effects of demographic and trait characteristics. Specifically, the current study enables to disentangle individual differences in response to trauma and separate the effect of trauma on health risk behaviours from possible confounders known to be associated with health risk behaviours. Data were used from a large British sample of young adults (N = 236,755, age 18–35) who participated in an online survey. Young adults who had experienced the sudden death of a loved one, violence, or non-sexual ..