Cross-cultural validation of measures of traumatic symptoms in groups of asylum seekers from Chechnya, Afghanistan, and West Africa

Internal consistencies and convergent validities of (a) the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25 (HSCL-25; Mollica, Wyshak, deMarneffe, Khuon, & Lavelle, 1987), (b) the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ; Mollica et al., 1992), (c) the Impact of Event Scale (IES-R; Weiss & Marmar, 1997), (d) the Bradford Somatic Inventory (BSI; Mumford et al., 1991), (e) the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS-1; Blake et al., 1990), and (f) the Social Adaptation Self-Evaluation Scale (SASS; Bosc, Dubini, & Polin, 1997), were determined in 150 asylum seekers from Chechnya, Afghanistan, and West Africa using diagnostic interviews as a criterion. For all the instruments, except the SASS, estimates of internal consistency were satisfactory. When used as a continuous measure of symptom frequency and intensity, the CAPS-1 had excellent convergent validity for all three ethnic groups, while formal PTSD criteria yielded high numbers of false negative diagnoses. Among the questionnaires, for Chechnyans the HTQ, and for Afghans and West Africans the IES-R achieved best results with respect to convergent validity.