The Child PTSD Symptom Scale: A Preliminary Examination of its Psychometric Properties

Reports on the development and preliminary validation of the Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS) for children and adolescents. The CPSS is a new instrument that was developed to assess the severity of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994)...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of clinical child and adolescent psychology 2001-09, Vol.30 (3), p.376-384
Main Authors: Foa, Edna B., Johnson, Kelly M., Feeny, Norah C., Treadwell, Kimberli R. H.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adolescent Behavior - psychology
Child
Child psychology
Children
Children & youth
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV
Discriminant validity
Female
Humans
Male
Post traumatic stress disorder
Posttraumatic stress disorder
Psychological measurement
Psychometric properties
Psychometrics - statistics & numerical data
Reproducibility of Results
Severity of Illness Index
Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - diagnosis
Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic - psychology
Surveys and Questionnaires
Symptoms
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Summary:Reports on the development and preliminary validation of the Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS) for children and adolescents. The CPSS is a new instrument that was developed to assess the severity of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in children exposed to trauma. The CPSS was administered to 75 school-age children approximately 2 years after the 1994 Northridge, California, earthquake. The psychometric properties of the CPSS show high internal consistency and test-retest reliability for both the total score and the three subscales. Convergent validity with the Child Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Reaction Index (CPTSD-RI) was established. As expected, the correlations of the CPSS with depression and anxiety measures were lower than those with the CPTSD-RI, providing some support for discriminant validity of the CPSS. These results suggest that the CPSS is a useful tool for the assessment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) severity and for the screening of PTSD diagnosis among traumatized children.
ISSN:1537-4416
0047-228X
1537-4424
DOI:10.1207/S15374424JCCP3003_9