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Infant School Children And Natural Disasters: Results From The Early Childhood Trauma Self-Report
Book chapter   Peer reviewed

Infant School Children And Natural Disasters: Results From The Early Childhood Trauma Self-Report

B M McDermott, Peter Gibbon and E M Lee
Focus on Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research, pp.71-93
Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
2005
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Abstract

Psychology early childhood trauma post distaster post traumatic stress
Following a wildfire disaster 450 Infant School children aged 5 to 9 years completed a 20-item questionnaire, the Early Childhood Trauma Self-Report (ECTS-R), concerning their post-disaster feelings and concerns. Their parents completed a 12-item questionnaire focusing on event-related factors including the evacuation and separation experiences of their child, and a child symptom checklist. The Infant School students became very engaged in the screening process, as evidenced by low rates of missing data and incorrectly completed questionnaires. They reported experiencing potentially trauma inducing events such as evacuation from their homes, separation from parents and fears about dying during the disaster. They were also able to report negative feeling states such as being frightened during the disaster and persisting symptoms, such as nightmares and trying not to think about the disaster six months after the event. Girls scored significant higher on mean symptom scores than boys. No age or school grade differences in mean symptom scores were detected, nor were there differences between those who had experienced evacuation or separation on the day of the wildfires and those who had not. Parents reported significantly fewer post-disaster symptoms in their Infant School children than did the children themselves. Concordance of parent and child symptom report was low, even comparing similar questions on the parent- and child-report checklists. In contrast to the results based on the infant self-report, results from the parent-report indicated that there were significantly higher mean symptom scores for Infant School children who experienced evacuation, separation or higher wildfire-related threat perceptions than for those children who did not share such experiences or perceptions. The implications of these findings are discussed including the possible need for a different causal model for infant emotional trauma than that hypothesized for older children. Service implications are also discussed, in particular the utility of post-disaster screening for Infant School students and the relative worth of employing self-report and parent-report measures of symptoms with this age group.

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