Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Bernstain et al., 1994)

• Populations: Turkish Adolescents, Chinese Adolescents, American Adults
• Age ranges: 14 - 19; 24-68
• Languages: Turkish, Chinese, English, Spanish
• Countries: Spain; Turkey

Items

Subscales:

• physical abuse, 12 items 
• emotional abuse, 18 items
• sexual abuse, 5 items

Short Form Subscales:

• Sexual Abuse, 5 Items
• Emotional Abuse, 5 Items
• Physical Abuse, 5 Items
• Emotional Neglect, 5 Items
• Physical Neglect, 5 Items

Full Scale not reported, example items:

• I was punished with a belt, a board, a cord, or some other hard object (physical abuse)
• People in my family called me things like ‘stupid’, ‘lazy’, or ‘ugly’” (emotional abuse)
• Someone tried to touch me in a sexual way, or tried to make me touch them (sexual abuse)

“Each traumatic experience is rated on a 7-point scale of frequency and severity; objective scoring criteria and examples are provided in a manual” (Bernstain et al., 1994)

Scoring

Short form Scoring

“Each item is rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale from 1 (never) to 5 (almost always). Some of the items are written in reverse (shown Table 1 in as item number followed by “R”), so those must be recoded before calculating the scores (5=1 and 1=5). There is a total score and independent scores for the five subscales. Therefore, the total score ranges from 25 to 125 and the subscale scores from 5 to 25. According to the original manual, the 
cut-off values of the CTQ-SF subscales classify severity into four 
levels, from “none” to “extreme” (Bernstein et al., 2003)” (García-Fernández et al., 2024)

Citations

• Bernstein, D, Fink, L., Handelsman, L., Foote, J., Lovejoy, M., Wenzel, K., Sapareto, E., Ruggiero, J. (1994). Initial reliability and validity of a new retrospective measure of child abuse and neglect. American Journal of Psychiatry, 151(8), 1132-1136. https://doi-org.ezproxy1.lib.gla.ac.uk/10.1176/ajp.151.8.1132
• WEKERLE, C., WOLFE, D. A., HAWKINS, D. L., PITTMAN, A., GLICKMAN, A., & LOVALD, B. E. (2001). Childhood maltreatment, posttraumatic stress symptomatology, and adolescent dating violence: Considering the value of adolescent perceptions of abuse and a trauma mediational model. Development and Psychopathology, 13(4), 847-871. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579401004060
• Rezan, A., & Erogul, Ç. (2012). Psychometric Properties of Turkish Version of Childhood Trauma Questionnaire among Adolescents with Gender Differences. Psychology, 03(10), 916–922. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2012.310138
• Peng, C., Cheng, J., Rong, F., Wang, Y., & Yu, Y. (2023). Psychometric properties and normative data of the childhood trauma questionnaire-short form in Chinese adolescents. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1130683. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1130683
• García-Fernández A, Martínez-Cao C, Sánchez-Fernández-Quejo A, Bobes-Bascarán T, Andreo-Jover J, Ayad-Ahmed W, Cebriá AI, Díaz-Marsá M, Garrido-Torres N, Gómez S, González-Pinto A, Grande I, Iglesias N, March KB, Palao DJ, Pérez-Díez I, Roberto N, Ruiz-Veguilla M, de la Torre-Luque A, Zorrilla I, Pérez V, SURVIVE Group, Sáiz PA and García-Portilla MP (2024) Validation of the Spanish Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form in adolescents with suicide attempts. Front. Psychol. 15:1378486. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.137848

Team comments

This measure also has a Short Form we collected validation for in the Spanish language. (García-Fernández et al., 2024)

The Internal Consistency rating of the Short form Physical Neglect subscale did not reach our threshold for adequacy.