Second, among states already represented in both Merrick’s study and our study, we collected updated data from 13 states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Wisconsin). Third, our study limited data to a single year. Merrick et al. used several years of data for a single state (this was the case for eight states in their study), whereas ours only allows for the latest year of each state counting only once. We believe that using multiple years of the same state possibly inflates the data from that region and also may account for duplicative data (e.g., people may have taken the survey twice and thus were counted twice in their analyses, overrepresentation of a particular state and/or region, unbalanced racial/ethnic categories, etc.). Lastly, Merrick’s study did not utilize any type of significance testing. We further expand on their methods by utilizing post-estimation F-tests to assess differences in ACEs prevalence among demographic variables in order to detect significant differences among groups.
