The following limitations should be considered. First, NESARC diagnostic interviews were administered by trained lay interviewers rather than clinicians, which has the potential to decrease the validity and reliability of measurement via false-negative diagnoses (Eaton et al. 2000). This concern is somewhat mitigated by the AUDADIS’s structured design (Hasin & Paykin, 1999). Second, this is a cross-sectional study, which limits causal inferences. Third, retrospective self-reports may be unstable over time (Fergusson et al. 2000; Polanczyk et al. 2009), typically underestimating trauma exposure prevalence, potentially biasing this study’s findings towards the null. Additionally, participants’ perceptions of how stressful each childhood IPV exposure was not measured. Fourth, race/ethnicity categories were based on US census options, categorizing heterogeneous populations as five homogeneous groups. Fifth, as noted above, parental violence assesses violence on behalf of the participant’s father figure (or mother’s partner) towards mother figure (or father’s partner), and therefore excludes mother-on-father figure violence, and other non-traditional familial structures (e.g. mother-on-mother or father-on-father violence).
