The Factor Structure of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms in Patients With Traumatic Spinal Cord Injuries

The latent structure of post-traumatic stress disorder among Arabic-speaking refugees receiving psychiatric treatment in Denmark

“…Symptom C3, trauma related amnesia, consistently loaded below 0.2 and thus make a poor contribution to the construct of PTSD in this sample. A number of previous cross-cultural studies also reported this as the weakest loading item [22, 26, 38, 44, 53]. It is perhaps the most disputed symptom of PTSD and critics question whether dissociative amnesia is a likely, or even possible, result from traumatic experiences [27, 39].…”

“…As the 5-factor model is a relatively recent conception, to our knowledge it has not yet been tested in a refugee population. It has, however, been tested in at least three studies of non-Western, non-refugee populations, showing favourable results [4, 26, 53]. It has also generally been found to provide superior fit compared to alternative models [3].…”

Sufficiency of a Two Factor Model for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms in Spinal Injury

“…Nonetheless, the factor correlations shown in Table 3 of Liu et al (2014) are also sufficient to support a two factor rather than a five factor model. The avoidance and intrusion factors are highly correlated (r = 0.74) but less correlated with the other three factors (0.53 b r b 0.64).…”

“…The recent study by Liu, Wang, Cao, and Zhang (2014) that was published in the Archives of Psychiatric Nursing concluded that their results confirmed the five-factor symptom model for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in spinal cord injury patients that Elhai and Palmieri (2011) originally proposed. However, that conclusion is not wellsupported by the data and analysis in the study because of high correlations between factors, which suggest redundancies among the five factors, as highlighted below.…”

“…Selective correlation within subsets is usually shown by establishing a low correlation between the factors that are extracted. Table 3 in Liu et al (2014) shows the factor correlations ranging from 0.53 to 0.77 with a mean of 0.64 + 0.1 SD. The mean interfactor correlation of 0.64 is only 11% lower than the mean intrafactor correlations of 0.71, which indicates that the correlation within subsets of items is practically the same as that between subsets of items and argues against the presence of multiple separate factors.…”