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How Prevalent Is Resilience Following Sexual Assault?: Comment on Steenkamp et al. (2012)
Author(s) -
Bonanno George A.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of traumatic stress
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.259
H-Index - 134
eISSN - 1573-6598
pISSN - 0894-9867
DOI - 10.1002/jts.21803
Subject(s) - sexual assault , psychology , psychological resilience , posttraumatic stress , poison control , clinical psychology , injury prevention , human factors and ergonomics , psychiatry , medicine , medical emergency , social psychology
Steenkamp, Dickstein, Salters‐Pedneault, Hofmann, and Litz (2012) analyzed latent trajectories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms on data obtained in the early months following a single‐incident sexual assault. In contrast to previous studies of potentially traumatic events, they did not observe a trajectory of minimal symptoms or resilience, which they argued occurred because sexual assault involves more severe and direct trauma exposure than examined in previous studies. Although sexual assault is an aversive and challenging event, it seems highly unlikely that at least some sexual assault survivors would not be resilient. Steenkamp et al.'s failure to observe resilience can easily be explained on purely methodological grounds. Most notably, their findings were probably heavily influenced by sampling bias. Additionally, their sample size was too small and had too much missing data for the kinds of latent trajectory modeling they attempted.