Validation of the Brazilian-Portuguese Version of the Clinician Administered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Scale-5.

Objectives

The aim of this study was to validate CAPS-5 for the Brazilian-Portuguese language on a sample of 128 individuals from two centers (from the cities of São Paulo and Porto Alegre) who have been recently exposed to a traumatic event.

Methods

We performed a reliability analysis between interviewers (with a subset of 32 individuals), an internal consistency analysis, and a confirmatory factorial analysis for the validation study.

Results

The inter-rater reliability of the total PTSD symptom severity score was high [intraclass correlation coefficient =0.994, 95% CI (0.987-0.997), p < 0.001]. Cohen's Kappa for individual items ranged between 0.759 and 1. Cronbach's alpha coefficients indicated high internal consistency for the CAPS-5 full scale (α = 0.826) and an acceptable level of internal consistency for the four symptom clusters. The confirmatory factorial analysis for the 20-item original CAPS-5 did not fit the data well. A 15-item model with better results was then established by excluding the following CAPS-5 items: dissociative amnesia, recklessness, distorted cognitions, irritability, and hypervigilance.

Conclusion

Despite the limitation of the predominance of female victims, and the high number of sexually assaulted women in our sample, the model with only 15 items provided a good fit to the data with high internal consistency (α = 0.835).