Traumatic Events Questionnaire (TEQ)

Vrana & Lauterbach, 1994

Description

The 11-item Traumatic Events Questionnaire (TEQ) assesses 9 events such as experiencing a serious accident (industrial, farm or car), receiving news of serious injury or death of someone, and being a victim of physical or sexual abuse. It also allows for an unspecified traumatic event to be examined. For each event endorsed, respondents are asked to provide the frequency, age at the time(s) of the event, degree of injury, degree of life threat, degree of how traumatizing the event was at the time, and degree of how traumatizing the event is currently. A 7-point scale (1="not at all" to 7="extremely") is used for each of the degree questions. The TEQ is suitable for research and clinical purposes.

Sample Item

Have you witnessed someone who was mutilated, seriously inured, or violently killed? (How many times? How old were you at the time? Were you injured? Did you feel your life was threatened? How traumatic was this for you at that time? How traumatic is this for you now?).

Versions

The military version includes 3 additional items that examines serving in a war zone (e.g., being a Prisoner of War and observing or participating in atrocities).

References

Vrana, S. R. & Lauterbach, D. (1994). Prevalence of traumatic events and post-traumatic psychological symptoms in a nonclinical sample of college students. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 7, 289-302.

Additional Reviews

Orsillo (2001) (PDF) p. 296.

Orsillo, Susan M. (2001). Measures for acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. In M.M. Antony & S.M. Orsillo (Eds.), Practitioner's guide to empirically based measures of anxiety (pp. 255-307). New York: KluwerAcademic/Plenum. PILOTS ID 24368

Norris and Hamblen (2004) (PDF) p. 67.

Norris, Fran H. & Hamblen, Jessica L. (2004). Standardized self-report measures of civilian trauma and PTSD. In J.P. Wilson, T.M. Keane & T. Martin (Eds.), Assessing psychological trauma and PTSD (pp. 63-102). New York: Guilford Press. PILOTS ID 18638

To Obtain Scale

Scott Vrana, PhD
Dept. of Psychology
Virginia Commonwealth University
Natchitoches, LA 71457
Email: srvrana@saturn.vcu.edu

Measure availability: Information on measures is available to everyone. However, the assessment tools themselves can only be distributed to qualified mental health professionals and researchers. We maintain measures developed by affiliated staff of the National Center for PTSD.