Development and Validation of the Complex Trauma Inventory

What is it about?

We created a brief self-report instrument that measures the ICD-11 trauma disorders. This instrument, the Complex Trauma Inventory (CTI), is freely available to the public (https://psychology.unt.edu/cti).

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Why is it important?

The results from our study identified five advantageous CTI characteristics: (a) the CTI is one of the first published self-report instrument that is consistent with the ICD-11 trauma disorders. (b) It was designed to assess both the intensity and frequency of the trauma-related symptoms which helps the mental health professional gain a better understanding of the respondent’s clinical presentation. This design, versus the traditional self-report scales that only assess how bothered the respondent is by a symptom, may better aid the tracking of symptom change which can inform treatment progress. (c) The CTI was designed to have at least three items per first-order factor in order to allow researchers to explore how different trauma elements are related to each other and other mental health constructs using higher-level statistical analyses (e.g., SEM). (d) The instrument has excellent psychometric properties (i.e., content validity, structural validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity). (e) It is gender invariant and can be used with both male and female populations. Our study therefore developed a brief, ICD-11-consistent and psychometrically-sound instrument that is tailored to assist the needs of both mental health professionals and researchers. The CTI is available for free on our website: http://psychology.unt.edu/cti. Please contact justinlitvin@my.unt.edu if you have any questions or comments.