Psychometric properties of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) in Greek women after cesarean section.

Kenta Matsumura,Evangelia Antoniou,Eirini Orovou,Irina Mrvoljak Theodoropoulou

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0255689

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine psychometric properties of the revised Posttraumatic Stress Checklist (PCL-5) for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual- 5th Edition (DSM-5) in Greek postpartum women after Cesarean Section(CS) (emergency-elective).So far, there was no study in Greece assessing psychometric properties of the PCL-5 in women after CS. The participating women (N = 469), who gave birth with emergency and elective CS at the Greek University Hospital of Larisa, have consented to participate in two phases of the survey and completed self-report questionnaires, the 2nd day after CS and at the 6th week after CS. Measures used in this study were the PCL-5 for DSM-5, the Life Events Checklist (LEC-5), Criteria B, C, D, E, and Criterion A, specifically designed for detection of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in postpartum period. To evaluate the internal reliability of the PCL-5 two different indices of internal consistency were calculated, i.e., Cronbach's alpha (.97) and Guttman'ssplit-half (.95), demonstrating high reliability level. The data were positively skewed, suggesting that the reported levels of PTSD among our participants were low. Factor analyses demonstrated acceptable construct validity; a comparison of thePCL-5 with the other measures of the same concept showed a good convergent validity of the scale. Overall, all the results suggest that the four-factor PCL-5 seemed to work adequately for the Greek sample of women after CS.

Highlights

The Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental health problem that some people develop after experiencing or witnessing a life-threatening event like combat, disaster, assault or sexual violence (Criterion A) [1]
It is observed that the original four-factor structural model, χ2(164) = 1014.64, p < .001, RMSEA = .105, RMR = .038, GFI = .82, CFI = .90, TLI = .88, AIC = 8439.92 was not fully confirmed by our data (Table 3).after model modification, with 45 error covariance, which differ from zero and strictly withinfactors, and which we identified through the modification indices, the model of the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist (PCL)-5 with 20 questions, χ2(126) = 434.79, p < .001, RMSEA = .60, RMR = .024, GFI = .92, CFI = .96, TLI = .94, AIC = 602.79, was satisfactory confirmed by our data
There were significant positive correlations between symptoms of PTSD investigated by the PCL-5 scale, with A, B, C, D, E post-traumatic stress disorders criterions and Life Event Checklist (LEC-5).Concretely, to evaluate the PCL-5 associations with the PTSD criterions, we examined correlations between both total and factor PCL-5 scores, and B, C, D, E criterions and Life Events Checklist-5 (LEC-5), indicating presence of PTSD symptoms and known to be strongly associated with exposure to traumatic events, as well as with criterion A, created for this study

Summary

Introduction

The Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a mental health problem that some people develop after experiencing or witnessing a life-threatening event like combat, disaster, assault or sexual violence (Criterion A) [1]. The most common PTSD symptoms are clustered into a four-dimensional structure: Intrusion/re-experiencing (Criterion B), avoidance (Criterion C), negative alterations in cognition and mood (Criterion D) and alteration in arousal and reactivity (Criterion E) [2,3,4]. One of the most frequently used PTSD measure is the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist (PCL) which has recently undergone substantial revision in the 5th Edition of Diagnostic.

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