Lifetime Exposure to Traumatic Events

We used a modified version of the Life Events Checklist for DSM-5 to measure exposure to twelve specific, contextually relevant lifetime PTEs. Events of interest included: seeing people hitting or harming one another in your family as a child, physical assault or abuse as a child, sexual assault or rape as a child, physical assault or abuse as an adult from an intimate partner, physical assault or abuse in adulthood from someone other than an intimate partner, sexual assault or rape in adulthood, seeing someone physically assaulted or abused, seeing someone seriously injured or killed, experiencing a natural disaster, experiencing a serious accident or fire, exposure to war, and losing a child through death. One additional question asked individuals to identify any other traumatizing event experienced during childhood or adulthood. We explored the free response text describing any “other” type of experienced lifetime traumatic events and recategorized these events if they fit more appropriately in a pre-defined category (e.g., one individual who reported death of a child through childbirth had not reported loss of a child to death. This event was recoded to loss of a child to death).
For analytic purposes, similar events were further combined such that seven distinct event types were considered: trauma during childhood, experiencing violence in adulthood, witnessing violence in adulthood, accidents, death of a child, war, and any other PTE. We also created a dichotomous variable to represent individuals who were and were not in the top quarter of number of PTEs reported. Individuals in the top quarter reported 6 or more PTEs.