Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was officially recognised as a clinical syndrome in 1980 in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) DSM-III stimulating scientific interest, resulting in a surge of research. Individuals needing treatment were being identified through clinical measures that then guided treatment distribution (Marshall, Spitzer, & Liebowitz, 1999). Two measures developed was the Penn Inventory for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (Hammarberg, 1992) and the PTSD Checklist for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–Fifth Edition (PCL-5) in Veterans (Bovin et al., 2016). The purpose of this paper is to review the psychometric soundness of these two measures. Psychometric soundness is based on
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The diagnosis was then divided into subtypes; acute: symptoms up to and including 6 months, chronic: more than 6 months and delayed: occurs at least 6 months after the event. If all syndromes were present immediately following the traumatic event then an official diagnosis could be made, however, the significant revision in DSM-III-R required a minimum symptoms duration of 30 days (Marshall, Spitzer, & Liebowitz, …show more content…
In Phase 1 of the Penn Inventory, of the 83 cases sensitivity was 90%, meaning that 90% of the patients, in-treatment and posttreatment, had a Penn Inventory score of 35 or above. Out of the 52 positive diagnosis cases, five from the posttreatment group were identified as false negatives. Only longitudinal data could determine whether this result pointed to a treatment effect. The construction of the control groups, the determination of the cut off scores to measure the classification parameters and the prevalence rate of 63% determined the results for initial support for classification validity. To serve as a correlational validity measure the Combat Exposure Scale was embedded to collect data in the background (Hammarberg,
The diagnosis was then divided into subtypes; acute: symptoms up to and including 6 months, chronic: more than 6 months and delayed: occurs at least 6 months after the event. If all syndromes were present immediately following the traumatic event then an official diagnosis could be made, however, the significant revision in DSM-III-R required a minimum symptoms duration of 30 days (Marshall, Spitzer, & Liebowitz, …show more content…
In Phase 1 of the Penn Inventory, of the 83 cases sensitivity was 90%, meaning that 90% of the patients, in-treatment and posttreatment, had a Penn Inventory score of 35 or above. Out of the 52 positive diagnosis cases, five from the posttreatment group were identified as false negatives. Only longitudinal data could determine whether this result pointed to a treatment effect. The construction of the control groups, the determination of the cut off scores to measure the classification parameters and the prevalence rate of 63% determined the results for initial support for classification validity. To serve as a correlational validity measure the Combat Exposure Scale was embedded to collect data in the background (Hammarberg,