engleski

Psychometric validation of Croatian Stress Scale for psychological war consequences.

A major problem in determining psychological effects of combat is a lack of valid measuring instruments. The Watson PTSD Questionnaire, probably the best known diagnostic instrument for identifying PTSD, base on findings and criteria in DSM, is most efficient when administered individually, as a basis for clinical interview, whereas the results obtained in a group can only be used for a rough assessment of symphoms severity, not for a reliable inference on presence or absence of symptoms. Other known PTSD questionnaires (e.g. Mississippi Combat Scale ; L.A. Check List ; Impact of Event Scale) still need more psychometrical examination, and the extent of their dependence upon cultural specificity and situational circumstances, especially as regards war trauma, remains uncertain. the Croatian Stress Scale - CROSS has been developed by Croatian psychologists (Bunjevac and Kuretovac-Jagodić, 1996) for the purpose of determining psychological trauma in victims of war. It consists of 21 item covering Intrusion, Avoidance, Psychosomatic symptoms and Survivor Guilt (according to DSM classification of PTSD symptoms), and 15 items related to attitude towards life and social environment. This paper reports on the validation of basic metrical features of The CROSS Questionnaire on a representative sample of 1719 professional Croatian soldiers. Item analysis supports the reducing of the Questionnaire from initial 36 to 33 items, preserving at the same time the discriminativity of the instrument and ensuring a more interpretable latent structure. The coefficient of reliability (Sperman-Brown) of the original version of the Questionnaire is 0.896 whereas for the reduced version is 0.897. The relationship between CROSS Questionnaire and the Traumatic Combat and War Experience Questionnaire (Kuterovac, Bunjevac, 1996), Watson PTSD Questionnaire and Mississippi Combat Scale has been examined in order to check content validity, and the results obtained support the inferred metric validity of CROSS Questionnaire as a psychological instrument for determining psychological consequences of traumatic war experiences.

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