Investigation of abbreviated 4 and 8 item versions of the PTSD Checklist 5.

By Matthew Price, D. Szafranski, Katherine van Stolk-Cooke, D. Gros. 2016

218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a significant public health concern associated with marked impairment across the lifespan. Exposure to traumatic events alone, however, is insufficient to determine if an individual has PTSD. PTSD is a heterogeneous diagnosis such that assessment of all 20 symptoms is problematic in time-limited treatment settings. Brief assessment tools that identify those at risk for PTSD and measure symptom severity are needed to improve access to care and assess treatment response. The present study evaluated abbreviated measures of PTSD symptoms derived from the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) - a 20-item validated measure of PTSD symptoms - across two studies. In the first, using a community sample of adults exposed to a traumatic event, 4-and 8-item versions of the PCL-5 were identified that were highly correlated with the full PCL-5. In the second, using a sample of combat veterans, the 4-and 8-item measures had comparable diagnostic utility to the total-scale PCL-5. These results provide support for an abbreviated measure of the PCL-5 as an alternative to the 20-item total scale.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Epidemiology

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Citations in the corpus

Developing an optimal short-form of the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) (2019, methodology): “Like other PTSD screeners (i.e., PC‐ PTSD‐5 and the 4‐item PCL‐5 developed by Price et al., 2016), however, our final short‐form includes items assessing for at least one symptom from each DSM‐5 PTSD criterion, though the individual items are mostly different (e.g., only one overlapping item…”