Examining the validity and reliability of childhood abuse scales: putting The Courage To Heal to the test.
OBJECTIVE
The main purpose of the current study was to examine the validity and reliability of The Courage To Heal Workbook checklist (Davis, 1990) in part, through examining the internal consistency and studying whether the CTHC distinguished between the participants reporting sexual abuse histories and those who did not.


METHODS
Two hundred and seventy-nine college students were surveyed utilizing the symptom checklist from the Courage to Heal Workbook, Trauma Symptom Checklist-40 (TSC-40), Abusive Behavior Inventory (ABI), and questions related to participants' beliefs that they had been abused as a child.


RESULTS
Results indicated that the Courage to Heal Checklist (CTHC) has robust reliability (alpha = .97) and can significantly discriminate between reported abuse survivors and nonsurvivors. Fifty-five percent of those participants reporting sexual abuse, 47% of those reporting physical abuse, and 34% of those reporting emotional abuse indicated a period of time during which they did not remember the abuse.


CONCLUSIONS
Results indicate that the CTHC reliably differentiated between participants reporting past sexual abuse and those who did not. Mounting evidence continues to support that adult symptom profiles are able to indicate that some form of trauma is likely to have occurred in the past; however, differentiating between types of abuse based on symptom profiles may be impossible.
Brandyberry
L J
LJ
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA.
MacNair-Semands
R R
RR
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002649:Child Abuse / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D003376:Counseling; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D011594:Psychometrics; D012094:Repression, Psychology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012737:Sex Factors; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000628:therapy