Adverse Childhood Experiences, Childhood Food Insecurity, and Academic Outcomes among Undergraduate Students: Evidence for a Cognitive Misattribution Pathway from a Mining-Community University in Ghana

Abstract

This article examines the association between childhood food insecurity and academic outcomes among undergraduate students at the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT), Tarkwa, Ghana. Childhood food insecurity is operationalised through the economic hardship and poverty-related neglect items of a culturally adapted adverse childhood experiences (ACE) instrument, and the two terms are used in that stipulated relationship. The article employs a focused secondary analysis of an explanatory sequential mixed-methods study. Phase 1 surveyed 358 undergraduates (86.1% response rate) recruited by stratified random sampling across faculty and year of study, using a culturally adapted 25-item ACE instrument alongside the K10 and the University Student Engagement Inventory, and analysed using Pearson correlations, chi-square tests of independence, independent-samples t tests, and moderated multiple regression. Phase 2 comprised 23 semi-structured interviews with participants purposively selected for elevated ACE burden and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. The study found that; economic hardship and poverty-related neglect were endorsed by 63.2 per cent of participants, the second most prevalent adversity type after community violence. ACE total score was negatively associated with cumulative weighted average (CWA; r = -.292, p < .001), and this association held after adjustment for age, gender, year of study, faculty, and source of financial support (standardised beta = -.31). CWA declined monotonically across bands of adversity burden, with students endorsing 11 or more adversity types recording a mean CWA 6.4 percentage points below those endorsing none or one. Interview accounts described a cognitive misattribution: hunger-induced concentration failure interpreted as personal intellectual inadequacy rather than physiological deprivation. Cognitive functioning was not directly measured, and the misattribution pathway is advanced as a theoretical proposition grounded in participants' accounts rather than as a demonstrated mechanism. The principal implication is that Ghanaian universities should assess student food security directly and provide psychoeducation that offers students an alternative explanation for adversity-related academic difficulties.