中華心理衛生協會

Purpose: Currently, only a few measures are available to assess PTSD symptoms in Taiwanese children. The purpose of the study was to translate the Child's Reaction to Traumatic Events Scale (CRTES) and its revised version, the CRTES-R, into Chinese (CCRTES and CCRTES-R) and to examine the psychometric properties of the Chinese translations. Methods: Seventy-nine Taiwanese children between 6 and 12 years old (mean age=9.48) and their parents participated in the study. In the screening phase, a semi-structured interview was conducted with the parents to determine the most stressful/traumatizing event to which the child had been exposed and the posttraumatic stress symptoms resulting from exposure to the event. If the children had experienced a stressful/traumatic event at least one month prior to the interview, they were enrolled in the assessment phase of the study. A semi-structured interview and the CCRTES/ CCRTES-R completed by the child and a parent-report measure were used to assess the child's PTSD/PTSD symptoms. Results: The CCRTES and CCRTES-R have good internal consistency, adequate convergent validity, and satisfactory criterion validity. When compared to the CCRTES-R, the CCRTES fit the hypothesized two factor structure better than the CCRTES-R fit its hypothesized three factor structure. Conclusions: In general, the psychometric properties of the CCRTES are similar to those of the CCRTES-R; however, the construct validity of the CCRTES was better than that of the CCRTES-R. Thus, the CCRTES should be the preferred method of assessing posttraumatic stress symptoms in Taiwanese children, particularly in clinical settings, while researchers continue to examine the use of the CCRTES-R.