Archiving and harmonizing data on prevention and treatment of child traumatic stress - The Child Trauma Prevention and Treatment (CTPT) Data Archive will address critical barriers to using
existing data to improve interventions for children impacted by traumatic experiences. Exposure to trauma is
unfortunately common for children and adolescents. Each year, tens of millions around the world experience
trauma; a significant proportion develop traumatic stress or related sequelae that impact child health and
functioning. Recent meta-analyses have found evidence for effectiveness of some preventative and treatment
interventions with traumatized children, but many questions crucial to improving these interventions (eg,
moderators and mediators of effectiveness) cannot be addressed with aggregate data. Single studies have
small Ns that limit statistical power and the ability to examine potential demographic disparities in treatment
effectiveness. Integrative cross-study analyses using individual patient data are crucial, but hindered by
enormous practical barriers (access to data, effort required for dataset integration / harmonization).
The CTPT Data Archive will address these critical barriers by gathering data from intervention studies
around the world with children exposed to traumas such as injury, violence, or maltreatment; applying coding
and metadata to facilitate cross-study harmonization; and making data and related tools and resources
accessible to researchers. Developed in conjunction with the Global Collaboration on Traumatic Stress, the
project advances `FAIR data principles' – making research data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and
Re-usable. We leverage the solid framework provided by the Prospective studies of Acute Child Trauma and
Recovery (PACT/R) archive of non-intervention studies.
Our overarching objective is to build an expandable research resource for the field that will enhance the
utility and value of child trauma studies - and ultimately improve child trauma interventions - by facilitating
integrative cross-study analyses. The project has the following specific aims:
Aim 1: Initiate CTPT Archive with data from ≥ 25 intervention studies, representing >~2000 participants;
Aim 2: Apply coding and metadata for individual- and study-level data elements to facilitate harmonization
Aim 3: Ensure data preservation / accessibility and promote data use
We will create tools and resources (including relevant syntax and algorithms) for researchers contributing or
using CTPT data and disseminate these via the childtraumadata.org website, and will deposit standardized /
harmonized datasets with an established repository to ensure long-term preservation and accessibility.
This project advances NICHD's goal of archiving and documenting existing datasets within its scientific
mission, enabling secondary analyses by the scientific community. The CTPT archive will be an ongoing
research resource, taking in data and enabling novel analyses of how and for whom child trauma interventions
work, so that we can effectively address the impact of trauma on child health and well-being.