Evaluating a community fire as human-made vs. natural disaster moderates the relationship between peritraumatic distress and both PTSD symptoms and posttraumatic growth

ABSTRACT

Objective: This study examined whether attributing a cause of a community fire to a human-made vs. natural disaster moderated the association between peritraumatic distress (PD) and posttraumatic stress (PTSD) symptoms, as well as between PD and posttraumatic growth (PTG).

Method: Participants lived in Israeli communities affected by wide-scale fires in November 2016. At Time 1 (within one month of the fires), 390 participants completed measures. At Time 2 (four months after the fires), 223 of the original participants completed follow-up-questionnaires. Participants reported their PD symptoms at Time 1, and their beliefs regarding the cause of the fire, PTSD symptoms, and PTG at Time 2.

Results: Higher levels of PD at Time 1 were associated with higher levels of both PTSD symptoms and PTG at Time 2. Participants who believed that the fires were more of a human-made than natural disaster had stronger associations between PD and PTSD symptoms, and stronger associations between PD and PTG.

Conclusions: Attributions regarding the cause of a disaster may be related to both PTSD symptoms as well as PTG. Balanced and responsible public announcements regarding the causes of traumatic events may reduce the deleterious effects in the aftermath of a traumatic event.

KEYWORDS:

• Peritraumatic
• human-made disaster
• natural disaster
• PTSD symptoms
• PTG

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. We ran multiple imputation on our main dependent and independent variables, in order to examine dropout effects on our results. Ten imputations were conducted, and pooled results were used. Analyses with and without multiple imputations led to very similar findings; the result from the imputed sample was slightly weaker but still significant and in the same direction. Results showed that after controlling for all the covariates, a significant interaction between peritraumatic symptoms and cause for the fire, B = .06, t(380) = 2.79, p = .005, 95% CI = [.02, .11], accounting for an additional 2% of the variance in PTG level in W2. The overall model explained 26% of the variance in PTG symptoms. Next we conducted the same analyses but this time with PTSD symptoms and the predicted variable. Results showed that after controlling for all the covariates, a significant interaction, B = .14, t(380) = 2.99, p = .003, 95% CI = [0.05, 0.23] accounting for an additional 2% of the variance in PTG level in W2. The overall model explained 18% of the variance in PTG symptoms.