engleski

The traumatic combat and war experiences questionnaire : Psychometric validation on a sample of Croatian professional soldiers

A number of studies were undertaken to examine the relationship between severity of PTSD symptoms and the extent of exposure to war stressors (e.g. Pend et al., 1981 ; Boman, 1982 ; Hezler et al., 1987), whereas studies that aimed to determine specific types of war combat experiences as potential stressors in war conditions are qute few. Besides, it should be noted that war experiences may differ one from another, depending on the nature of war and on war zone. Considering specific war conditions in Croatia in the 1991-1996 period, Bunjevac and Kuterovac-Jagodić (1996) developed The Traumatic Combat and War Experiences Questionnaire, intended for measuring types and frequency of war stressors in combatants. The Questionnaire includes 40 different (traumatic) war experiences. The items are answered on a 3-point scale that describes the frequency of experiences. "Never" (1), "Once" (2), "More than once" (3). The first psychometric validation of the Questionnaire was conduced by the authors themselves (1996), on a sample of 629 Croatian war veterans. This paper reports on the further validation of The Questionnaire on a sample of 1719 professional Croatian soldiers. A low discriminative validity has been found in some items, and subjects' free answers have shown that the Questionnaire should include more traumatic experiences. Unlike in the first validation, this study has discovered a latent structure with 8 dimensions (not 7), which only partly agreed in content. Regression analysis has shown that items in the Questionnaire as set of predictors only account for 31% variance of war trauma as measured by the CROSS questionnaire, so later on the relationship between type of trauma symptoms has been studied.

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