Pilot Testing a New Short Screen for the Assessment of Older Women's PTSD Symptomatology

Abstract

It is difficult for busy health care providers to perform routine screening for older women's posttraumatic stress symptomatology. This difficulty is due, at least partially, to a paucity of instruments specifically tested on such a population. To address this issue, in this preliminary study we tested an abbreviated screen from the set of 20 items comprising the Distressing Event Questionnaire (DEQ; Kubany, Leisen, Kaplan, & Kelly, 2000a) on a convenience sample of 94 ethnically diverse older women (age 52–105). This new five-item derivation, named Brief Posttraumatic Stress Screening Scale (BPSSS), assesses posttraumatic stress based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994). Its conciseness reduces the likelihood that older women would become fatigued during assessment, making it ideal for use in busy health care settings. In view of the hypothesized cohesiveness of the tool's five items, we expected the screen to be reliable. Because the BPSSS has only five items, a single factor was hypothesized to account for a large proportion of the variance in its items. We also expected that scores on the screen would correlate (to a certain extent) with those on measures of depression and perceived stress of a nontraumatic and nonmedical nature. A standardized alpha of .86 demonstrated high internal consistency of the BPSSS, and the exploratory factor analysis showed that one factor accounted for 58% of the five items' variance. Moreover, the correlations of BPSSS scores with scores on nontraumatic stress and depression were moderate yet significant (r = .37, p < .01 and r = .50, p < .01, respectively).