The Trauma Symptom Checklist for Young Children (TSCYC): reliability and association with abuse exposure in a multi-site study

Objective: The Trauma Symptom Checklist for Young Children (TSCYC) is a 90- item caretaker-report measure of children's trauma- and abuse-related sympt omatology. It contains two reporter validity scales and eight clinical scal es [Post-traumatic Stress-Intrusion (PTS-I), Post-traumatic Stress-Avoidanc e (PTS-AV), Post-traumatic Stress-Arousal (PTS-AR), Post-traumatic Stress-T otal (PTS-TOT), Sexual Concerns (SC). Dissociation (DIS). Anxiety (ANX), De pression (DEP), and Anger/Aggression (ANG)], as well as an item assessing h ours per week of caretaker contact with the child. This paper introduces th e TSCYC and describes its psychometric properties in a multisite validity s tudy. Method: A total of 219 TSCYCs administered by six clinician/researchers acr oss the United States were analyzed for scale reliability and association w ith several types of childhood maltreatment. Results: The TSCYC clinical scales have good reliability and are associated with exposure to childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse, and witnessing do mestic violence. The PTS-I, PTS-AV, PTS-AR, and PTS-TOT scales were most pr edictive, followed by SC in the case of sexual abuse and DIS in the case of physical abuse. There were a small number of age, sex, and race effects on TSCYC scores. Conclusions: The TSCYC appears to have reasonable psychometric characterist ics, and correlates as expected with various types of trauma exposure. Subj ect to continued validation and the development of general population norms , its use as a clinical measure is supported. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved.