The childhood PTSD scales are now into Version 4. So if your copies do not have a small R4 on the bottom of each page, you might want to consider requesting the latest versions. As I mentioned above, I used data from our research projects with traumatized kids and teens out here in conjunction with data provided by Allison Dubner on 144 kids and teens, mostly boys, who had been placed in foster homes, to identify five or six questions that were either not providing a ny useful information or were providing contradictory information, and I dropped these questions from the scales. I also rewrote a few questions slightly and split one question into two. In addition, I was able to flag several questions as of questionab le use. These are questions that may or may not be able to provide useful information and that will require further research to help us determine that. These questions of questionable utility have been marked as such on the rating sheets.
I have now had extensive experience with the different age-specific versions of my lifetime stressor checklists. As a consequence of this experience, I have changed the way all but the Tough Times Checklist (the school-aged version) i s completed. The original versions of each of these checklists asked respondents to check each potential stressful experience that had happened at least once in their lives. Then, only for those experiences checked, they were asked to rate how upsetting the worst instance had been for them. Unfortunately, too many respondents, even among college students (on the Young Adults Upsetting Times Checklist) and parents (on the Upsetting Times Checklist) proved unable or unwilling to follow what I considered to be simple directions. Too often respondents would only check what was supposed to be their rating of the distressfulness of an event they had experienced. That would frequently mean that someone would go through and rate every single experience, usin g the Not At All rating to indicate either that the event was not distressing or that it never occurred. Among college students I also found the tendency to rate each and every event as if it had happened to them. Oy! Such are the vagaries of questionnaire design.
As a consequence of these problems, I have redesigned the stressor checklists for all but the Tough Times Checklist for school-aged kids, which only asks kids to check those events that have happened to them. For the rest of the checklists, respondent s are asked to rate each and every event, entering on the Teen Tough Times Checklist, for example, a 0 if they never had the experience, a 1 if they had the experience but the worst instance did not upset them at all, a 2 if they experienced and the worst experience was somewhat upsetting, a 3 if they experienced it and the worst experience was very upsetting, and a 4 if the worst experience was totally upsetting.
Another change is based on recent research that suggests that stressful experiences that occurred in the past year may be the most distressing. Each checklist now asks respondents to rate each experience twice, once for whether or not it happen ed in the last year, and again for whether or not it happened any time before the last year.
Some minor wording changes have been made on a few items on all of the checklists,too. A couple of events have been added to the Teen Tough Times Checklist, too, to assess having an adverse reaction to drugs or alcohol and either getting pregnant or g etting someone pregnant.
If you don't have a copy of the Young Adults Upsetting Times Checklist, you might find it interesting. It is the only one of my lifetime stressor scales that asks explicit questions about exposure to various types of physical and sexu al abuse, both within and outside of the family. Gil Skidmore, M.Ed., recently administered this scale (in its old form) to about 300 college students, and we reported some of the results at the ISTSS conference in Montreal in November of 1997. If you w ould like to read more about some of the surprising results, write and ask me for a copy of the paper .
The new version of the DOSE includes methods of rating durations (of typical one-time exposure or chronic exposure, for example). More importantly, it includes a detailed method of computing overall scores regardless of whether or not sexual abuse is the event or series of events being assessed.
I've been trying to get my PTSD scales translated into Spanish for years now. In the process I have learned what a frustrating process that can be. For a language that is supposed to be one of the easiest in the world to learn, it is surprisingly dif ficult to create meaningful translations in. Part of the reason is, I have learned, that there are almost as many different versions of Spanish as there are places in the world in which it is spoken. Puerto Rican is not the same as Cuban is not the same as Venezuelan is not the same as the Spanish spoken in Spain, etc. In fact, words in one version of Spanish may mean something entirely different in another version.
Another difficulty appears to be related to what might be considered the difficulty of translating general or abstract English terms into a language that prefers more concrete, specific terms. Thus, I am told, translating "bad thing" is extremely chal lenging. Moreover, pronouns need to be gender-specific, which can make for downright awkward wording.
Despite all of these difficult challenges, my collaborators (who include my daughter, who studied Spanish and has spent time in Mexico and Spain, as well as a psychologist from Venezuela) and I are nearing completion of a Spanish version of the paper-and-pencil Parent's Report of the Child's Reaction to Stress.
A French version of the Childhood PTSD Interview is also nearing completion. As is a French version of the World View Survey.
E-mail me for more information on all of the scales, or write: Kenneth Fletcher, Ph.D., Psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, 55 Lake Avenue North, Worcester, MA 01655.