Symptom overreporting obscures the dose-response relationship between trauma severity and symptoms.
We investigated whether symptom overreporting affects the dose-response relationship between self-reported abuse severity and psychiatric symptoms in two samples. The first sample (N=599) consisted of adults who had previously reported to a public commission that they had been witnesses to or victims of childhood sexual abuse by Roman Catholic Church representatives. The second sample (N=1756) consisted of general population respondents who indicated that they had been victims of non-familial childhood sexual abuse. Using a web-based data collection procedure, both samples completed the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI-18), items addressing abuse severity, and items flagging symptom overreporting. Adjusting for overreporting reduced the proportion of participants with clinically raised BSI-18 scores from 60% to 47% in sample 1 and from 26% to 22% in sample 2. Also, in both samples, normal range reporting participants exhibited the typical dose-response relationship between trauma severity and BSI-18 scores, whereas this pattern was largely non-significant in overreporting participants. Our findings show that symptom overreporting has a psychometric impact that may obscure relationships between clinically relevant variables and should therefore preferably be monitored in surveys.
Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. Electronic address: h.merckelbach@maastrichtuniversity.nl.
Harald
H
Merckelbach
Department of Psychiatry, and EMGO+ Institute, Free University Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Willie
W
Langeland
Scientific Council For Government Policy, The Hague, The Netherlands.
Gerard
G
de Vries
Department of Psychiatry, and EMGO+ Institute, Free University Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Nel
N
Draijer
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002410:Catholicism; D002648:Child; D002650:Child Abuse, Sexual / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010555:Personality Inventory; D011594:Psychometrics; D057566:Self Report; D040921:Stress Disorders, Traumatic / Q000150:complications / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology*
Brief Symptom Inventory; Self-reports; Symptom overreporting; Trauma