Posttraumatic Growth in Treatment-seeking Female Assault Victims

Abstract

The importance of measuring growth outcomes following a traumatic event has been highlighted in recent literature. Although reports of growth are abundant, the relationship between growth outcomes and post-trauma distress remains unclear, with studies yielding conflicting results regarding this relationship. The purpose of the present study was to explore the interrelationships among growth outcomes and measures of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among 100 female treatment-seeking physical and sexual assault victims. Although the majority of women reported some degree of growth in this study, and growth scores were comparable to those from other samples, measures of depression and PTSD were not significantly related to growth scores. The implication of these findings and future direction for research are discussed. Keywords Posttraumatic growth; Perceived benefits; Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); TraumaThere is little doubt that trauma exposure and the associated clinical syndrome of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affect a significant number of individuals [1,2], are associated with extensive psychiatric comorbidity [2,3], and are linked with impairment across a number of psychosocial domains [4]. Despite this considerable body of research, the concept of posttraumatic growth, or the possibility that an individual can "grow" psychologically from an adverse life event, has gained increased attention in the past few years [5]. Although the term used to describe posttraumatic growth has varied across studies (e.g., "perceived benefits," "positive psychological changes," "stress-related growth") [6][7][8][9], the conceptual aim of measuring growth outcomes typically has been to assess whether individuals can in some way move beyond a premorbid level of functioning following a traumatic event [10]. Thus, within the posttraumatic growth framework, an adverse experience is viewed as a potential catalyst for positive psychological and interpersonal change.Studies examining a variety of adverse experiences such as disasters [11] Although reports of growth are common, the relationship between growth outcomes and psychological adjustment is unclear. It seems plausible that the ability to derive growth from a traumatic event could serve to ameliorate the negative psychological effects of the trauma.In support of this view, researchers examining a wide range of stressors have documented an inverse relationship between a number of growth domains and measures of adjustment [11,14,18,[21][22][23][24][25][26]. However, other studies have yielded mixed support for this relationship [7,13,27,28], while a third group of studies have failed to find a significant relationship between measures of adjustment and growth [15,17,29,30]. Clearly, additional efforts are needed to clarify the relationship between growth outcomes and measures of adjustment.The use of study-specific growth outcomes likely has complicated the effort to examine how psychological growth relates to symptom severity. That is,...

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