Datasets for "Autobiographical memory of care-experienced young people: Memory characteristics and associations with maltreatment and mental health"

This is data collected from 62 care-experienced young people aged 10-17 years old, and their social workers and carers. Included is basic demographic information for the young person and variables representing the key constructs that we were interested in measuring; maltreatment, memory and mental health. Social workers reported on maltreatment severity using Kaufman et al. (1994) rating scales, which cover: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, domestic violence (each rated on a 0-4 scale), and neglect (rated on a 0-10 scale). We have also measured posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using the Child and Adolescent Trauma Screen (CATS; Sachser et al., 2017) and depression using the 10-item Depression subscale from the Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale - short version (RCADS-short; Ebesutani et al., 2012). We have both child and carer report on these measures. The memory variables were derived from the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT; Williams & Broadbent, 1986), which was delivered 1:1 with the young person by a trained researcher, according to standard instructions. Participants were asked to provide a specific memory in response to 10 cue words in the following order: happy, lonely, interested, hurt, surprised, sad, successful, angry, safe, and careless. These open-ended responses were then coded to identify memory specificity (as per standard coding procedures for this task), memory valence, memory importance, and the relational nature of the memory (See manuscript for further information about memory coding).