Fordham University, Bronx, NY, USA.
University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.
Assessment. 2023 Jul;30(5):1369-1378. doi: 10.1177/10731911221101912. Epub 2022 Jun 14.
Trauma researchers often make claims about the severity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) across populations, and yet cross-cultural measurement invariance (MI) is rarely assessed. Nine youth samples with Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) responses were grouped based on sampling strategy used into two sets: representative (Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Lithuania, = 1,457), and convenience (Greenland, India, Kenya, Malaysia, and Uganda, = 2,036). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to gauge whether configural, metric, scalar, and residual invariance of different models held between national samples within the two sets. Configural invariance held for most PTSD models in convenience samples, not in representative samples. Metric invariance was less common, and scalar and residual in general did not hold. Cultural similarity between samples seemed to be associated with invariance. Findings suggest that although PTSD symptoms may cluster similarly across culturally distal groups, comparisons of the severity of symptoms using the HTQ across adolescent samples are not likely valid.
创伤研究人员经常在不同人群中声称创伤后应激障碍（PTSD）的严重程度，但很少评估跨文化测量不变性（MI）。根据使用的抽样策略，九组有哈佛创伤问卷（HTQ）回复的青年样本被分为两组：代表性样本（丹麦、法罗群岛、冰岛和立陶宛，n=1457）和便利性样本（格陵兰、印度、肯尼亚、马来西亚和乌干达，n=2036）。验证性因子分析（CFA）用于评估不同模型在两组内的国家样本之间是否具有组态、度量、标度和残差不变性。便利性样本中大多数 PTSD 模型的组态不变性成立，而代表性样本中则不成立。度量不变性较为常见，而标度和残差一般不成立。样本之间的文化相似性似乎与不变性有关。研究结果表明，尽管 PTSD 症状在文化上相距较远的群体中可能会相似地聚集，但使用 HTQ 比较青少年样本中症状的严重程度可能并不准确。
