This study examines physical and sexual revictimization in a random sample of incarcerated and poor, urban, nonincarcerated women using multiple measures of physical and sexual child abuse. Researchers used hierarchical logistic regression to compare rates of revictimization and the strength of the association between child abuse and adult victimization using two measures of child physical abuse and four measures of child sexual abuse. Incarcerated women had higher rates of revictimization than did nonincarcerated women. Child abuse and adult incarceration were directly associated with adult victimization; interactions between child abuse and incarceration were associated with adult victimization for only a few definitions of child abuse. Findings suggest that the relationship between child abuse and adult victimization is robust and that factors in incarcerated women's lives further increase the probability of adult victimization.

Using an experimental design, we investigated the impact of participation in trauma-related research on well-being in a sample of 219 higher education students. We created five conditions that exposed participants to questions about life events. A sixth condition represented a control condition. Exposure conditions varied according to whether they contained yes/no questions about events that entailed stress, stigma, trauma, or sexual violation. We operationalized well-being by measuring positive and negative affect, state anxiety, and positive reactions to research. Across exposure conditions, participants reported low levels of negative affect and generally positive reactions immediately after participation. The most negative and least positive responses followed exposure conditions that contained questions about stressful events and sexual violation. We discuss implications of our findings for ethics review board practices.

No abstract