This study developed and tested a continuous measure of the variance shared across three forms of childhood adversity. The factor structure of the CTF is consistent across data from two samples with markedly different ascertainment strategies and characteristics. In addition, applying the factor loadings from the primary (CT Study) sample to a third sample yielded a similar pattern of association with psychiatric and substance use disorder outcomes. As opposed to commonly used categorical measures of childhood trauma, the CTF distills risk common to several types of childhood adversity to create a single continuous measure that is free of some components of measurement error inherent in the individual observed items and provides wider coverage of the childhood trauma construct. These advances reduce the potential for multicollinearity which occurs when multiple binary measures of trauma are used in a single regression analysis while providing greater statistical power than categorical measures (Viel et al. 2005).
