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.
Goodman
L A
LA
Psychology Department, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park 20742, USA. lgoodman@bss3.umd.edu
Corcoran
C
C
Turner
K
K
Yuan
N
N
Green
B L
BL
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