“…Because childhood adversities tend to cluster together, measures of "cumulative adversity" are often derived as counts of events occurring during a specified time period (Atkinson et al, 2015;Evans, Li, & Whipple, 2013;Raposa, Hammen, Brennan, O'Callaghan, & Najman, 2014;Turner & Lloyd, 1995), with greater numbers of events associated with greater severity of mental health problems (Björkenstam et al, 2017;Chapman et al, 2004;Edwards, Holden, Felitti, & Anda, 2003;Fergusson, Woodward, & Horwood, 2000;Mersky et al, 2013;Schilling et al, 2007). However, many studies of cumulative adversity rely on retrospective self-reports of childhood events and circumstances (Benjet et al, 2010;Lloyd & Turner, 2008;Whitesell et al, 2007), use simple counts of dichotomized items (Slopen, Koenen, & Kubzansky, 2014;Slopen, Kubzansky, McLaughlin, & Koenen, 2013), and fail to account for the timing or persistence of adversity throughout childhood (Appleton, Holdsworth, Ryan, & Tracy, 2017;Slopen et al, 2014) when examining its effects on health later in life.…”