Preliminary Danish Norms for the Odense Child Trauma Screening (OCTS)

AbstractThe Odense Child Trauma Screening (OCTS) is Danish story stem screening tool applicable for assessment of preschoolers and young children in risk of being traumatized. Having shown initial evidence of validation, Danish norms are needed to strengthen the clinical assessment with the OCTS by serving as a baseline comparison for assessment of potentially traumatized children. We tested 169 children from the Danish general population aged 4 –8 with the OCTS and investigated sex and age differences in play-based behavior and narrative representations. Caregivers reported electronically on child demographic information, psychosocial functioning, and history of trauma exposure usingThe Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) andThe Diagnostic Infant and Preschool Assessment (DIPA) trauma list. Across the 145 scores of the OCTS coding scheme, significant sex and age differences were only found in five and sixteen scores respectively. In the five codes where significant sex differences were observed, boys ’ normative scores were higher. No significant sex differences were found in the partial story scores or the OCTS total score. Three significant age differences in partial story and OCTS total scores emerged with 4-year-olds scoring higher than 6–8-year-olds. We further found 13 significant age differences in code scores with higher scores among the youngest of the two groups in question suggesting that scores tend to decrease along older age. Few significant s...
Source: Journal of Child and Adolescent Trauma - Category: Child Development Source Type: research