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The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) checklist was first conceptualised as the result of an attempt to understand links between childhood experiences and long-term health outcomes.

It is important to understand that this initial research was undertaken with a US-based population sample consisting of mostly white, average to welloff, insured patients within a medical setting, and that the questions developed for the checklist were not the result of a rigorous review to select those variables most likely to predict health outcomes. Using such populations, with limited samples, as a ‘norm’from which to judge global populations is a noted problem, and despite a growing body of research showing some global generalisability for the ACEs checklist, it often fails to consider wider societal pressures. Of particular concern in Aotearoa New Zealand is that the ACEs checklist fails to adequately account for the often …