Premium
Are Adult Offspring Reliable Informants About Parental PTSD? A Validation Study
Author(s) -
YEHUDA RACHEL,
LABINSKY ELLEN,
TISCHLER LISA,
BRAND SARAH R.,
LAVIN YONIT,
BLAIR WILLIAM,
BIERER LINDA M.,
GOODMAN RACHEL Z.,
GROSSMAN ROBERT A.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1196/annals.1364.047
Subject(s) - offspring , psychology , clinical psychology , developmental psychology , biology , pregnancy , genetics
We developed a short questionnaire—Parental PTSD Questionnaire–(PPQ), designed to assess the presence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms in parents. Fifty‐eight adult offspring of Holocaust survivors (23 men and 35 women) completed the questionnaire about a parent who was independently evaluated by a trained clinician using the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS). Only 5.2% of the offspring reported, “not knowing” if their parent had experienced 10 or fewer symptoms, while 56.9% provided estimates for all 17 items. There were no significant differences between lifetime frequencies of the individual symptoms as endorsed on the PPQ compared to the CAPS when subjects with completed PPQs were compared with CAPS. Interrater reliability between offspring and clinician was highly significant for each of the items when evaluated separately so as to include data for subjects who endorsed not knowing if a certain symptom had been present. Further studies are warranted to examine the psychometric properties of this measure.