Date of Award

2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Zoe Smith

Second Advisor

Sungha Kang

Abstract

Black and Latiné youth are disproportionately impacted by targeted harm and trauma exposure, which is further exacerbated by stigma, biases, and punitive actions towards youth with attention deficit/hyperactive disorder (ADHD). This presents an urgent public health concern, as frequent exposure to trauma across development can lead to difficulties with behavior regulation, interpersonal relationships, impulse control, emotion regulation, and attention and cognition. Developmental trauma disorder (DTD) was proposed to capture the adverse developmental outcomes experienced by youth exposed to chronic trauma; however, there is a dearth of research on how to assess DTD. Thus, the current study aimed to establish support for a trauma assessment tool for measuring DTD among 50 Black and/or Latiné adolescents with ADHD. Adolescents completed self-report for mental health outcomes and other well-known measures of trauma (i.e., ACEs, discrimination, community violence) and neuropsychological testing assessed cognitive functioning. Adolescents and caregivers completed a psychodiagnostic interview. DTD was evaluated through the Developmental Trauma Symptom Screening Checklist (DTS-SC). Confirmatory factor analyses were performed on the current 5-factor DTS-SC structure, compared against the 3- and 7-factor structures proposed by previous researchers. Path analyses were used to determine associations between DTD and mental health and cognitive functioning outcomes. A six-factor structure of the DTS-SC, adding a dissociation factor to the original five-factor domains, was found to be best fitting model to measure DTD. The six factors, 1) emotion regulation difficulties, 2) social/relationship difficulties, 3) behavioral difficulties, 4) physiological difficulties, 5) cognitive/academic difficulties, and 6) dissociation, were significantly associated with mental health and cognitive difficulties, beyond associations with other trauma measures. Thus, the DTD-SC can be used to assess DTD for Black and/or Latiné youth with ADHD, with important implications for the development of responsive trauma assessment and liberatory treatment for systemically oppressed youth.

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