Social acknowledgment as a victim or survivor: a scale to measure a recovery factor of PTSD.
The development and validation of a new measure of social acknowledgment as a victim or survivor is presented, whose items were derived from previous research on social recovery factors of post-traumatic stress disorder. The Social Acknowledgment Questionnaire (SAQ) was administered to nontreatment seeking traumatized persons--178 former political prisoners in East Germany and 151 recently traumatized interpersonal crime victims. Principal components analysis yielded three factors--Recognition as victim, General disapproval, and Family disapproval. The factors showed high internal consistency and good test-retest reliability; correlated moderately to strong with measures of PTSD severity, social support, and reluctance to talk about the trauma. In comparison to a conventional measure of social support, the SAQ predicted comparably better between persons with high- and low-PTSD severity.
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. maercker@klipsy.unizh.ch
Andreas
A
Maercker
Julia
J
Müller
D000328:Adult; D019548:Crime Victims / Q000523:psychology*; D005195:Family Relations; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011057:Politics; D011329:Prisoners / Q000523:psychology; D011379:Prognosis; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D012944:Social Support; D013313:Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic / Q000523:psychology* / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D017741:Survivors / Q000523:psychology*