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Millions of children experience traumas yearly, leading to physical and mental health issues. This review explores tools to measure trauma effects in children and parents' cognition, highlighting the importance of accurate assessment for effective interventions.
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Scales to measure post trauma effects in children and parents cognition about the trauma’s psychosocial consequences on children NajibehAtazadeh (MSPH student) Dr AbdolrezaShaghaghi (Associate Professor of Community Health) Dr HamidAllahverdipour (Professor of Health Education & Promotion) Faculty of Health, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences
Introduction • Millions of children are experiencing traumas in consequence of natural or manmade disasters such as earthquake, hurricane and war annually. • These traumas may cause serious short/long time physical and mental complications and add extra burden on the affected communities’ health indices.
Introduction • The existent research evidence are suggesting that a psychiatric problems among disaster-exposed youth could possibly lead to long-term mental health consequences. • The psychopathologic problems following disasters may vary from anxiety disorders, depression disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic and phobias in children and adults but their occurrence in children has much more significance.
Introduction • Understanding how children experience traumatic events and accurate assessment of these effects is therefore; pivotal for planning appropriate interventions to promote quality of life amongst survivors. • This systematic review was conducted to provide a cumulative research evidence about the measurement tools that were introduced to assess the trauma effects.
Methods • Google Scholar, SID, PsycInfo, Medlib, MedLine, and PubMed databases were speculated for the publications reporting the assessment tools of traumas’ effect. • Special focus was on scales that were introduced to measure traumas’ general effect, psychosocial distress, fear, prolonged grief, anxiety and depression in children aged 8 to 12 years and also parents' cognition of the effects on children.
Methods • The following search terms were selected based on the MeSH guideline: ("anxiety" or "fear" or "depression" or “psychosocial distress” or “prolonged grief” or "trauma general effect") AND "weights and measures“) OR ("cognition" and "parents‘) AND "weights and measures“). • The scales names their specifications, year of introduction, eligible age range to be applied and number of included items in each scale were tabulated.
Discussion • During the past 10-15 years, a growing number of publications were identified that reporting the measurement tools to assess traumas’ effects in children and adolescents. • Different types of scales were recognized to measure fear, prolonged grief and psychosocial distress specifically in young children but a sizable number of measures were not validated for Persian speaking populations.
Discussion • No scale was identified for assessment of parents' cognition about effects of traumas on children. • Selection bias was a probability in this review due to the limitations in access to the paid full text materials and also inclusion of the publications that were only written in English or Persian.
Conclusion • Cross-cultural validation of the scales to measure traumas’ effects on children could be a promising research area for the Iranian researchers. • Designing a measurement scale of parents' cognition about effects of traumas on children is necessary. It could help planning of evidence based intervention programs.
