Elsevier

Child Abuse & Neglect

Volume 33, Issue 8, August 2009, Pages 505-517
Child Abuse & Neglect

Development and psychometric evaluation of a new assessment method for childhood maltreatment experiences: The interview for traumatic events in childhood (ITEC)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2009.03.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Objective

We conducted a comprehensive assessment of the reliability and validity of the Interview for Traumatic Events in Childhood (ITEC, Lobbestael, Arntz, Kremers, & Sieswerda, 2006), a retrospective, semi-structured interview for childhood maltreatment. The ITEC aims to yield dimensional scores for severity of experiences of different childhood maltreatment dimensions.

Methods

Initial psychometric properties were tested with the pilot version of the ITEC in 362 participants. A second study assessed the revised ITEC in 217 participants, patients and non-patients.

Results

Factor analyses produced the best fit for a five-factor model (sexual, physical and emotional abuse, physical and emotional neglect). The scales had good internal consistency, except for the physical neglect subscale, and excellent inter-rater reliability. The scales were highly associated with equivalent scales of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (i.e., good convergent validity), and showed good correspondence with patient file information (i.e., good criterion validity).

Conclusion

These results support the reliability and validity of the ITEC, making it a potentially useful tool for assessing a broad range of traumatic events in childhood.

Practice implication

The first step in therapy for dealing with childhood maltreatment is to map abusive experiences and assess their severity and impact. Since maltreatment is a sensitive topic that is not reported on easily, trauma interviews are promising assessment instruments since they provide the opportunity to probe and clarify. There are hardly any well-validated trauma interviews available that assess the extent of maltreatment in and outside the family in various dimensions. The current study tries to fill this gap by presenting a new trauma interview; the Interview for Traumatic Events in Childhood.

Section snippets

Participants

The pilot ITEC was administered to 362 adults, including patients from several psychiatric hospitals (20.7%, n = 75), community mental health centres (51.6%, n = 188), TBS-clinics (4%, n = 14) and prisons (3.7%, n = 13) in the Netherlands and Belgium, and non-patients (20%, n = 72). TBS clinics are part of the Dutch forensic system and refer to forensic psychiatric hospitals for the residential treatment of mentally disordered offenders who are sentenced by criminal court to involuntary admission because

Study II

During the administration of the pilot ITEC, some participants reported maltreatment events and perpetrators that were not specified in the pilot ITEC. Therefore, for Study II, a new version of the ITEC was constructed. In this new version, several new events and perpetrators of childhood maltreatment were added. Moreover, in line with previous studies that stressed the importance of witnessing abusive events in the development of psychopathology (Glodich, 1998, Luster et al., 2002), witnessing

General discussion

To our knowledge, this is the first validation study of a trauma interview for childhood events to examine so many different aspects of reliability and validity. The findings provide initial support for the reliability and validity of the ITEC. A five-factor model consisting of sexual, physical and emotional abuse, emotional and physical neglect underlay the maltreatment reports when only victimization items were included in Study I. When several new items were added to the ITEC (Study II), the

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Veron Dings, Josephine Giesen-Bloo, Simkje Sieswerda and Anoek Weertman who gave permission to use their data, and to Silke Janssen and Arnt Schellekens for their help in collecting the data.

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