The Trauma Symptom Inventory (TSI) is a
psychological evaluation
Psychological evaluation is a method to assess an individual's behavior, personality, cognitive abilities, and several other domains. A common reason for a psychological evaluation is to identify psychological factors that may be inhibiting ''a p ...
/assessment instrument that taps symptoms of
Posttraumatic stress disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental disorder that develops from experiencing a Psychological trauma, traumatic event, such as sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, warfare and its associated traumas, natural disaster ...
and other posttraumatic emotional problems. It was originally published in 1995 by its developer, John Briere. It is one of the most widely used measures of posttraumatic symptomatology.
The TSI is relatively unique in comparison to other measures of posttraumatic symptomatology, in that it is a multi-scale instrument, including 10 scales of various forms of clinical
psychopathology
Psychopathology is the study of mental illness. It includes the signs and symptoms of all mental disorders. The field includes Abnormal psychology, abnormal cognition, maladaptive behavior, and experiences which differ according to social norms ...
related to psychological trauma. Also unique, it has three validity scales in order to assess the trauma victim's test-taking attitude, such as overreporting, underreporting and inconsistency. The TSI was not developed to detect the
Malingering of posttraumatic stress disorder although clinicians have used it to do so. Research shows that the TSI serves as a general validity screen but should be used cautiously in detecting malingered PTSD.
Original psychometric data on the TSI demonstrated statistically adequate
internal consistency
In statistics and research, internal consistency is typically a measure based on the correlations between different items on the same test (or the same subscale on a larger test). It measures whether several items that propose to measure the same g ...
(alphas ranging from .84 to .87). Validity with a civilian trauma-exposed sample has been demonstrated, with substantial relationships found between the TSI's clinical scale scores and other established measures of PTSD. Further corroboration of the TSI's psychometric properties, with trauma-exposed military veterans, was recently documented.
In 2011 a second edition of the TSI was published (TSI-2), Initial research demonstrated improved ability to detect simulated PTSD.
Research in Sweden found the TSI-2 to be statistically sound and a good broad-spectrum assessment instrument.
References
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Psychological tests and scales