The relationship between child sexual abuse and academic achievement in a sample of adolescent psychiatric inpatients

<b>Objectives:</b><br />To examine the relationship between sexual abuse and academic achievement in an adolescent inpatient psychiatric population. Individual factors expected to influence this relationship were measured to explore the way they each interacted with sexual abuse and its relationship to academic achievement.<br /><br /><b>Method:</b><br />Eighty-one adolescent psychiatric inpatients participated in the study (aged 12–18 years: M = 16.0). Participants were administered tests of academic achievement (dependent variable) and intelligence, and completed a number of self-report measures of their experience of different types of maltreatment, their perception of the parenting they received, socio-economic status, substance abuse, and psychopathology.<br /><br /><b>Results:</b><br />Hierarchical regression analysis revealed that intelligence was the main predictor of academic achievement (uniquely explaining 26% of the variance). A number of interaction effects were also significant indicating that intelligence, substance abuse, internalizing behavior problems, externalizing behavior problems all influenced the relationship between sexual abuse and academic achievement.<br />