NCT05984706

What Difficulties Do Children and Adolescents Experience in Everyday Activities After a Traumatic Event? Focus Groups and Delphi Survey for the Development of a Questionnaire on PTSD-related Functional Impairment

• Status: Completed
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 50 (actual)
• Sponsor: University Children's Hospital, Zurich · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 7 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in children and adolescents is often associated with a myriad of significant impairments in daily functioning, including family relationships, school/work, leisure time activities, and social relationships. While a majority of attention has been placed on definition and assessment of post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), less emphasis has been placed on the effect of PTSS on related functional impairment in daily life. The current assessment of PTSD-related functional impairment is conducted either with additional items inserted in PTSD measures that inquire about daily functioning or with the utilization of global functional impairment measures. The former approach is usually based on face validity only and varies content-wise. The latter approach often consists of scales that conflate symptoms with functioning, focus on impairment due to physical rather than mental health problems, and are not validated in trauma-exposed children and adolescents. Furthermore, scales usually do not include sufficient age-specific adjustments for younger children. Thus, the current assessment of PTSD-related functional impairment in children and adolescents demonstrates noteworthy shortcomings. Despite the well-recognized debilitating effect of PTSD on daily functioning, no measure has yet been developed to assess PTSD-related functional impairment tailored to trauma-exposed children and adolescents based on the input from the target population and their caregivers. The aim of this project is therefore to develop an instrument that assesses PTSD-related functional impairment in trauma-exposed children and adolescents (young children age 1-6 years (caregiver-report) as well as for older children and adolescents age 7-18 years (self- and caregiver-report)) by conducting focus groups and a Delphi survey.

Conditions

• PTSD
• Functioning, Psychosocial

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
OTHER	Focus groups and Delphi Questionnaire	1\. Focus groups to identify relevant domains of PTSD-related functional impairment in trauma-exposed children and adolescents to ensure content validity. 2. Delphi Questionnaire evaluation of a list of domains of PTSD-related functional impairment in trauma-exposed children and adolescents (previously selected from based on a literature review and focus groups) on a Likert scale of 1 to 5 for their relevance

Timeline

• Start date: 2023-11-20
• Primary completion: 2025-01-31
• Completion: 2025-02-28
• First posted: 2023-08-09
• Last updated: 2025-03-07

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Switzerland