Systematic review and critical appraisal of Childhood Trauma Questionnaire - Short Form (CTQ-SF).

BACKGROUND

Child maltreatment is a complex and multidimensional construct that encompasses a great number of risk factors. The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire - Short Form, one of the most widely used and validated instruments to assess childhood maltreatment in the past ten years, is a retrospective instrument that assesses several types of childhood abuse and maltreatment which is divided into five dimensions.

OBJECTIVE

The objectives of this systematic review are to critically appraise, compare, and summarize the methodological quality and psychometric properties of published research articles validating the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire - Short Form utilizing the COSMIN checklist.

METHOD

Articles published in English or Spanish, in the past ten years in the databases of Scopus, Web of Science, and ProQuest, and which, directly or indirectly analyzed psychometric properties of the CTQ-SF were screened, examined, and assessed utilizing the COSMIN checklist.

RESULTS

Main results indicate that there is a general pattern of assessing the same three psychometric properties (internal consistency, structural validity, and hypothesis testing) in a variety of samples, but leaving unassessed the rest of properties examined by the COSMIN checklist. Additionally, there are some problems with the internal consistency of several factors.

IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSIONS

While replicability and internal consistency are good psychometric indicators of the CTQ-SF, there is a big scientific gap of information regarding some psychometric properties. It is suggested that future research should address the remaining psychometric properties, reliability, measurement error, content validity, cross cultural and criterion validity, as well as re-examining internal consistency of some dimensions, in order to advance in the knowledge on childhood maltreatment assessment.