Assessing traumatic event exposure: general issues and preliminary findings for the Stressful Life Events Screening Questionnaire.
This article reviews the psychometric properties of the Stressful Life Events Screening Questionnaire (SLESQ), a recently developed trauma history screening measure, and discusses the complexities involved in assessing trauma exposure. There are relatively few general measures of exposure to a variety of types of traumatic events, and most of those that exist have not been subjected to rigorous psychometric evaluation. The SLESQ showed good test-retest reliability, with a median kappa of .73, adequate convergent validity (with a lengthier interview) with a median kappa of .64, and good discrimination between Criterion A and non-Criterion A events. The discussion addresses some of the challenges of assessing traumatic event exposure along the dimensions of defining traumatic events, assessment methodologies, reporting consistency, and incident validation.
Psychology Department, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park 20742, USA. lgoodman@bss3.umd.edu
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Goodman
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Corcoran
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Turner
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Yuan
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Green
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008016:Life Change Events; D008297:Male; D008403:Mass Screening / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010553:Personality Development; D010555:Personality Inventory / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D011594:Psychometrics; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology