Adverse childhood experiences are stressful or traumatic childhood experiences that include childhood abuse, childhood neglect, and household dysfunction. Adverse childhood experiences have been shown to cause victims to be vulnerable to health and behavioural problems throughout life. Although much research has been done to study the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and medical conditions, not many have studied how childhood stress can affect our mental health and well-being in the long term. The World Health Organisation has adopted and validated the ACE questionnaire which is a questionnaire used to determine whether an individual has experienced any of the ten types of childhood stress. In Ireland, the use of this questionnaire in adverse childhood experiences investigations remains limited.
Therefore, this research project aims to investigate the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and mental well-being in an adult Irish population using the ACE questionnaire. Specifically, this research will study how common are adverse childhood experiences in the adult Irish population. Each of the ten types of childhood stress will also be investigated to determine how common they are and how each of them affects our mental health and well-being.
