The Role of Childhood Homeownership in Shaping Multilevel Trajectories of Life Course Stress among Pregnant People in Georgia

Objective: Our objective was to create a multilevel longitudinal measure of life course stress and examine its association with early life wealth. Methods: We used data from a cohort of 431 pregnant individuals in Atlanta, Georgia who reported lifetime resident addresses and stressful events. We fit group-based trajectory models to identify patterns of multilevel stress, including residence in a low-resource tract, traumatic stressor count, chronic stressor count, and life event stressor count for 5-year intervals up to current age. We fit multinomial models to quantify the association between family homeownership in childhood and trajectory membership. Results: We identified four trajectories as the optimal model (mean predicted probability of group assignment: 0.988), with differences in levels and patterns of stress exposure across the life course. The most common trajectory (36%), “Stable Low” showed consistently low probability (~25%) of experiencing traumatic, chronic stress, or life stressors and low probability of residing in a neighborhood with high deprivation (<10%) at all time points. The rarest pattern (13%), “High exposure to multilevel stressors in childhood” was characterized by high report of all three event-based stressors in early childhood (>50%), with ~25% also residing in a low-resource neighborhood across ages. Individuals whose family never owned their home in childhood were 5.2 times more likely to belong to the riskiest (“High exposure”) pattern compared to the stable low pattern (95% CI: 2.1, 13.2). Conclusions: Family homeownership in childhood may be associated with lower exposure to adversity across the life course.