Recognizing Traumatization in Children Aged 4 to 8: A Pilot Validation Study of the Odense Child Trauma Screening (OCTS) Measure in Lithuania

ABSTRACT

Early identification of children at risk of posttraumatic stress symptomatology or other emotional and behavioral problems is highly needed for the prevention of long-term consequences of traumatic events and abuse. However, the assessment of the traumatization of very young children is challenging because they cannot fully verbalize their psychological experiences. The purpose of this pilot study was to test the internal consistency, interrater reliability, and validity of the Odense Child Trauma Screening (OCTS) measure, a structured play test for signs of traumatization in young children. The total sample was comprised of 26 (50%) children from the community and 26 from risk groups in Lithuania. The mean age of the participants was 6.44 (SD = 1.63; range 3–9); 62% were girls. The OCTS interviews were conducted with all children. The Child and Adolescent Trauma Screen (CATS) and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) were used to collect data about the child from the caregivers. Caregivers of the risk sample group reported significantly more potentially traumatic events experienced by the children (M = 2.73) than in the community sample (M = 1.00). The OCTS results indicated acceptable internal consistency and good inter-rater reliability. However, only one of the four OCTS stories scores was significantly higher in the risk group. We found no sex effects on the OCTS scores. This pilot study of the psychometric properties of the OCTS supports the reliability of the OCTS and indicates that the OCTS administration and coding procedures can be consistently applied in various settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Story stem test, validity, reliability
• trauma
• young children

Acknowledgments

LEGO® is the brand that belongs to the LEGO Group.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Abbreviations

OCTS: Odense Child Trauma Screening.

Authors’ contribution

PZ, OG, ID: writing – original draft; AE, SSL, EK: writing review and editing; ID, PZ: data collection; OG: data analysis; ID, EK, SSL: supervision; PZ: principal investigator, funding acquisition. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability statement

The datasets of the current study are not publicly available due to ethical reasons and data protection.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Ethics approval was issued by the Ethics Committee for Psychological Research at Vilnius University (2020‑02‑27, No. 35 and 2022-12-12 No. 14/(1.13 E) 250000-KT-187). Informed consent was obtained from one of the parents or caregivers of the child. Children could refuse to participate in the study if they did not want to participate.

Additional information

Funding

This project received funding from the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), agreement No S-MIP-22-22.