The Korean Version of the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children: Psychometric Properties and the Connection to Trauma among Korean Children and Adolescents

The purpose of the present study was to develop a Korean version of the trauma symptom checklist for children (TSCC) and to examine its reliability and validity for screening posttraumatic stress symptoms. A normative group of 405 children and adolescents aged 8 to 16 yr participated in the study. A test-retest procedure was conducted with 76 participants from the normative group after 4 weeks. In the traumatized group, 73 children and adolescents of the same age from the Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Center were included. Good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) for the total scale (0.95, ranging 0.79-0.85 on the clinical scales) and test-retest reliability for the total scale (r=0.91, ranging 0.71-0.87 on the clinical scales) were found. Confirmatory 6-factor analysis explained 51.1% of the variance. Other measures such as concurrent or discriminative validity were also shown to be satisfactory. In conclusion, the Korean version of TSCC has been shown to be a screening instrument with satisfactory psychometric qualities that is capable of identifying trauma symptoms among children and adolescents who have self-reported experiencing trauma or for whom clinicians have identified traumatic experiences.