Training in the
Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse (CECA) Interview

Contact: lifespantraining@rhul.ac.uk

Training courses are offered in the CECA research interview into neglect and abuse in childhood by the Lifespan Research Group at Royal Holloway, University of London, located in central London

The CECA interview is a retrospective measure of childhood and adolescent experience, which is designed for use with young people and adults1. It identifies etiological factors important in common mental health disorders such as depression and anxiety and encompasses both psychosocial risk and resilience factors. It has been developed and used over a 20 year period by the team at Lifespan to investigate lifetime risk factors for disorder, and has also been used by a number of teams in the UK and internationally. There is a questionnaire version (CECA.Q) validated against the interview.


The Interview
The CECA takes the form of a semi-structured interview, which aims to reflect objective features of early life experience with probing questions to ascertain details of context and time-sequence of experience. The interview takes an average of 1.5 hours or so to administer for a medium risk case and around three times as long to transcribe and score. The length of the interview is variable depending on the complexity of the childhood circumstances.

The interview assesses lack of care (neglect, antipathy), physical abuse, sexual abuse and psychological abuse, all of which are shown to relate to adolescent and adult psychological disorder. These form the Core CECA. Additional scales which can be utilized assess loss of parent, family arrangements, discord in the home, violence between parents, supervision and control of children, role reversal and childhood helplessness. Positive scales assess support, closeness to parents, coping and being the parents' favourite child. A brief measure reflecting circumstances of leaving home is also included. Demographic measures such as parental social class, sibling position and details of parental loss are also included.

The interview measure has high levels of reliability and validity. Since the measure is used retrospectively, questioning about childhood attempts to enhance recall by (i) allowing the respondent time to talk at length by using a number of general open questions in addition to detailed ones and (ii) dealing with childhood experience chronologically and in detail in order to further trigger memory. The adolescent measure can be used from age 13.

The interview has been translated into different languages, and used in research in Portugal, France and Italy as well as in Canada and USA.

A version for practitioners is developed for its use in clinical contexts with adults or adolescents. This involves the scoring of information in case flies according to CECA principles in order to aid with analysis of complex cases to inform chronologies produced for court, and care planning.

1Bifulco A & Moran P (1998) Wednesday's Child: Research into wormen's experience of neglect and abuse in childhood and adult depression. Routledge, London, New York.

The Questionnaire: CECA.Q2

A brief self-report version has been validated against the interview. This assesses loss of parents, neglect, antipathy from main carers and physical and sexual abuse. Support in childhood is also included. The measure shows acceptable sensitivity and specificity againszt the interview measure, and published cut-off scores are available. The CECA.Q has been translated into a number of languages (eg Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese) and has been used in Europe, USA, Canada, South America and the Far East.

The measure is associated with both the Parental Bonding Instrument and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire3, but has wider coverage of maltreatment, shows a dose-response effect in relation to lifetime clinical depression and has improved improved prediction of disorder. A longer version of the questionnaire including psychological abuse items is available on request.

download CECA Questionnaire

2Bifulco A, Bernazzani O, Moran PM & Jacobs C (2005) Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse Questionnaire (CECA.Q) Validation in a community series. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 44: 563-581.

3Fisher HL, Barber R, & Morgan C (under review). Concurrent validity of the Childhood Experience of Care and Abuse Questionnaire (CECA.Q) and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). British Journal of Clinical Psychology.