title: The child PTSD Symptom Scale: a preliminary examination of its psychometric properties.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: E B
authors.initials: EB
authors.lastname: Foa
authors.forename: K M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Johnson
authors.forename: N C
authors.initials: NC
authors.lastname: Feeny
authors.forename: K R
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Treadwell
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000294:Adolescent Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires