The International Trauma Consortium
Advancing research in global psychotraumatology
World Psychiatry Publication
This page accompanies our Letter to the Editor published in World Psychiatry. Here you will find our paper along with figures that accompany our analyses.
Manuscript
Click on the reference below to read the manuscript.
McElroy, E., Shevlin, E., Murphy, S., Roberts, B., Bisson, J. Ben-Ezra, M., & Hyland, P. (2019). ICD-11 PTSD and Complex PTSD: Structural validation using exploratory graph analysis. World Psychiatry, 18, 236-237.
Figure 1
Figure 1 presents the item-level means and 95% confidence intervals for the two samples. The lack of overlap in confidence intervals indicated that the Ukrainian group scored significantly higher on the six PTSD items, whereas the Israeli group scored higher on the six DSO items.
Figure 2
Figure 2 presents the symptom networks for the two samples. For ease of visual comparison, the networks were restricted to an average layout (i.e. node placement reflects average positioning across the two networks). The networks were densely connected; out of a possible 66 edges (12*11/2), 38 (58%) were significant in the Israeli sample, and 46 (70%) were significant in the Ukrainian sample.
Community structures (i.e. non-random clusters of nodes) were observed in both networks (Q Isr = 0.42; Q Ukr = 0.33). EGA identified two clusters corresponding to PTSD and DSO in both samples (Figure 2), and this solution was confirmed when the networks were re-estimated using 1,000 bootstrapped draws.
Figure 3
Figure 3 presents the centrality values for the networks. They were broadly similar for the Israeli and Ukrainian samples, however the importance of some symptoms differed across the groups, e.g. ‘Avoidance of external reminders’ (strength), ‘Finds it hard to stay emotionally close to people’ (closeness and betweenness), and ‘Is jumpy or easily startled’ (betweenness).
