Open AccessHispanic ethnicity and Caucasian race: Relations with posttraumatic stress disorder’s factor structure in clinic-referred youth.
Author(s) -
Ateka A. Contractor,
Meredith A. Claycomb,
Brianna M. Byllesby,
Christopher Layne,
Julie B. Kaplow,
Alan M. Steinberg,
Jon D. Elhai
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
psychological trauma
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.059
H-Index - 48
eISSN - 1942-9681
pISSN - 1942-969X
DOI - 10.1037/tra0000068
Subject(s) - ethnic group , psychology , clinical psychology , confirmatory factor analysis , measurement invariance , race (biology) , demography , psychiatry , structural equation modeling , statistics , botany , mathematics , sociology , anthropology , biology
The severity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms is linked to race and ethnicity, albeit with contradictory findings (reviewed in Alcántara, Casement, & Lewis-Fernández, 2013; Pole, Gone, & Kulkarni, 2008). We systematically examined Caucasian (n = 3,767) versus non-Caucasian race (n = 2,824) and Hispanic (n = 2,395) versus non-Hispanic ethnicity (n = 3,853) as candidate moderators of PTSD's 5-factor model structural parameters (Elhai et al., 2013). The sample was drawn from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network's Core Data Set, currently the largest national data set of clinic-referred children and adolescents exposed to potentially traumatic events. Using confirmatory factor analysis, we tested the invariance of PTSD symptom structural parameters by race and ethnicity. Chi-square difference tests and goodness-of-fit values showed statistical equivalence across racial and ethnic groups in the factor structure of PTSD and in mean item-level indicators of PTSD symptom severity. Results support the structural invariance of PTSD's 5-factor model across the compared racial and ethnic groups. Furthermore, results indicated equivalent item-level severity across racial and ethnic groups; this supports the use of item-level comparisons across these groups.