Objectives This study was to determine the effect of interpersonal trauma experience in childhood on post-traumatic growth in adults. Methods 266 adult men and women aged 20 to 59 in Korea were surveyed and analyzed through an Internet questionnaire. The research tool was the Korean version of childhood trauma. It was a questionnaire (Eun-jung Kim, Jin-sook Kim, 2010) and a post-traumatic growth scale (Si-hyung Kim et al., 2020). For the data, skewness and kurtosis were analyzed using the SPSS 22.0 statistical program to confirm whether the assumption of normality was satisfied, and correlation analysis and t-test for differences between major variables, One-way analysis of variance and hierarchical regression analysis were performed. Results First, as a result of verifying the difference in post-traumatic growth according to the background variable, men were significantly higher than women in all post-traumatic growth according to gender. According to marital status, married people were significantly higher than unmarried. Depending on the age, those in their 50s were significantly higher than those in their 40s, 30s, and 20s. In addition, the difference in overall post-traumatic growth was significant according to the type of interpersonal trauma experience in childhood, sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, double abuse, and emotional abuse appeared in order. In addition, there was no difference in the factors of trauma perpetrator between trauma period, caregiver, and childhood interpersonal relations. Second, as a result of the correlation analysis of the main variables, it was found that there was no significant correlation between the entire childhood trauma and the entire post-traumatic growth. However, among the sub-factors, emotional neglect and post-traumatic growth were negatively correlated, and sexual abuse and physical abuse were positively correlated with post-traumatic growth. In other words, the higher the emotional neglect, the lower the post-traumatic growth, and the higher the sexual and physical abuse, the higher the post-traumatic growth. Third, it was found that interpersonal trauma experience in childhood had a significant effect on post-traumatic growth. Emotional abuse during childhood trauma was static and emotional neglect was negative. It was found to have an effect. In other words, the higher the emotional abuse among childhood trauma experiences, the more post-traumatic growth. It can be interpreted that the higher the emotional neglect, the lower the likelihood of post-traumatic growth. Conclusions The results suggest that lowering emotional neglect is effective to increase post-traumatic growth.
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