The Child Behavior Checklist as an indicator of posttraumatic stress disorder and dissociation in normative, psychiatric, and sexually abused children.

Expert ratings and confirmatory factor analyses were used to derive a posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociation, and a combined PTSD/dissociation scale from the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Validity was established by examining the relationship of these scales to features of sexual abuse thought to relate to severity and chronicity, as well as to self-report scales of PTSD and dissociation. In addition, this study examined differences between normative, psychiatric, and sexually abused children on the new scales. Both the sexual abuse and psychiatric sample differed significantly from the normative sample on all scales, but not from each other. Despite correlations of the dissociation and PTSD/dissociation combined scale with features of trauma and child self-report of PTSD and dissociation, the absence of differences between the clinical groups on the derived scales suggests that the scales measure generic, as opposed to trauma-related, distress.