Background: Potential childhood traumatic experiences increase risk for mental and physical health disorders and their precise assessment can help to promote health prevention and promotion strategies for countries with limited data and measurement strategies like Colombia.
Objective: The goal of the present study is to strengthen evidence for the validity of scores from an adapted version of the Early Trauma Inventory self report-short form (ETI-SF) using Item Response Theory and by assessing factorial invariance across gender and education level.
Participants and setting: The study assessed a total of 1909 Colombian participants (66.16 % women, 32.16 % men, 1.68 % other gender; age range 18-72 years old).
Methods: Participants answered the ETI-SF via a web-based sampling strategy.
Results: The total scores of the scale showed good reliability coefficients (α = 0.81 and ω = 0.60). A specific analysis for the subscales showed good reliability for the emotional, physical, and sexual trauma subscales (αs and ωs >0.64), while general trauma showed lower than accepted reliability values (α =0.56 and ω = 0.37). Most of the individual items of the scale showed good calibration. The factorial invariance analysis suggests the possibility of some gender and educational differences.
Conclusions: The study confirms particularly high rates of potential childhood traumatic experiences in Colombia and complement data for specific trauma types. Overall, the ETI-SF is confirmed as useful for Colombia, which highlights this scale as a good tool to use for public health assessment. Future research can continue the integration of diverse methods for estimating the quality of the scale.
Keywords: Childhood traumatic experiences; Classical Test Theory; Colombia; Early Trauma Inventory; Item Response Theory.
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