Event-list construction and treatment of exposure data in research on political violence

Abstract

Event lists are commonly applied for measuring exposure to various kinds of potentially stressful and traumatizing life events. Before making general conclusions about the psychological effects of exposure to such events, problematic issues related to the use of event-list data need to be discussed and resolved. This article focuses on issues related to the construction and application of event lists for measuring exposure to political violence such as issues related to reliability, the applicability of the additive assumption, whether to weight event-list items, and the possible consequences of incomplete event lists. Alternative future approaches to these measurement issues are also discussed.

Daily stressors in the lives of Sri Lankan youth: a mixed methods approach to assessment in a context of war and natural disaster

“…The items gathered through the qualitative phase of our research design allowed us to construct a useful and contextually appropriate measure of daily stressors, which in turn allowed us to examine systematically the relations among war and disaster exposure, daily stressors, and mental health and psychosocial functioning among youth in eastern Sri Lanka. Netland (2005) has argued that a critical feature of any war events checklist is its inclusion of the full range of salient events in the particular setting where the research is being conducted. The authors agree, and would extend Netland's argument to the study of daily stressors, the stressful social and material conditions that form the context of everyday life in con£ict and post con£ict settings.…”

“…There is a growing debate, however, regarding the appropriateness of Cronbach's alpha for scales that measure exposure to stressful events, because the items on such scales do not assess latent constructs; consequently, their items should not be expected to correlate highly with one another (Netland, 2005). The authors partially agree with this critique of assessing internal consistency for a measure such as the CDSS; however, we also recognize that under conditions of armed con£ict or disaster, it seems likely that young people will be faced with a common, and at least moderately, inter-correlated constellation of stressors.…”

Sierra Leone's Former Child Soldiers: A Follow-Up Study of Psychosocial Adjustment and Community Reintegration

“…Such an approach may mask important dynamics related to the most severe forms of violence exposure, particularly those that distinguish the experiences of former child soldiers (Hatch & Dohrenwend, 2007;Hundt et al, 2004;Netland, 2005). Our work builds on the work of Macksoud and Aber (1996) who developed the CWTQ to address the need to make qualitative distinctions between different types of war-related experiences faced by children and youth.…”

KERF–Ein Instrument zur umfassenden Ermittlung belastender Kindheitserfahrungen

“…Häu-fig werden gleich mehrere unterschiedliche Kindheitsbelastungstypen erlebt Dong et al, 2004;Wingenfeld et al, 2010) und das Risiko psychiatrischer Erkrankungen steigt mit der Anzahl erlebter Erfahrungstypen (Chapman et al, 2004;Felitti et al, 1998;Whitfield, Dube, Felitti & Anda, 2005). Eine umfangreiche Erfassung belastender Kindheitserfahrungen ist demnach nicht nur methodisch ratsam (Netland, 2005), sondern auch klinisch unabdingbar. Dies übersteigt jedoch die Möglich-keiten der im deutschsprachigen Raum aktuell gängigen Instrumente: Der Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ; Bernstein et al, 2003;in deutschsprachiger Version Wingenfeld et al, 2010) beschränkt sich auf die Erfassung von körperlichem, emotionalem und sexuellem Missbrauch sowie körperlicher und emotionaler Vernachlässigung.…”

“…Weiterer Forschung bedarf es hinsichtlich der Evaluation (und eventuellen Korrektur) der vorläufigen Schwellenwerte, der Bestätigung der Subskalenlösungen für männliche Probanden sowie der Prüfung der Reliabilität der KERF. Letztere sollte nach Netland (2005) unter Verwendung von Retest-und Interrateranalysen auf Itemlevel erfolgen. Eine Ü berarbeitung der Subskala Bezeugte Gewalt an Geschwistern ist ebenfalls zu prüfen und ggf.…”