A Study for Scale Development: War Trauma Exposure Scale

Abstract

Despite being widely studied, research only deals with consequences of war. While assessing war effects, the existing instruments take war as a general trauma, simply ask about its existence and skip to the consequences. Thus, there is a gap in assessing what experiences the survivor went through. Aim of the study is to develop a scale that will enable understanding war experiences qualitatively, and also evaluate the impact of them quantitatively, named as War Trauma Exposure Scale (WTES). This study was carried out as part of a thesis (Author), with Turkish Cypriot women in North Cyprus (N = 168) considering Cyprus War. Three phases were followed: interview, pilot study, and psychometric examination. At psychometric investigation, factor analysis revealed three-factor solution: “Negative Emotions”, “Exposure to Violence”, and “Loss”. The overall reliability of WTES was good (r = .91). Both, Impact of Events Scale (IES-R) and the scale were gathered under the same factor with 75.68% variance. Scale showed significant correlations with other related constructs. ANOVA supported that the scale was parallel to IES-R. Chi-square fit test (?²) revealed a good fit. Consequently, the scale is relatively valid and reliable for measuring war-related exposure despite limitations. WTES, is a distinct one since (1) it directly focuses on war-trauma, (2) lists 23 real war-trauma exposures to be identified, (3) asks the survivor’s war experience and (4) assess its influence. Therefore, unlike existing scales to assess war-trauma, WTES helps to understand unique exposure of the war-survivor and assess the psychological impact these exposures.