Citation

Bonanno GA. J. Trauma. Stress 2013; 26(3): 392-393.

Affiliation

Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/jts.21803

PMID

23737298

Abstract

Steenkamp, Dickstein, Salters-Pedneault, Hofmann, and Litz (2012) analyzed latent trajectories of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms on data obtained in the early months following a single-incident sexual assault. In contrast to previous studies of potentially traumatic events, they did not observe a trajectory of minimal symptoms or resilience, which they argued occurred because sexual assault involves more severe and direct trauma exposure than examined in previous studies. Although sexual assault is an aversive and challenging event, it seems highly unlikely that at least some sexual assault survivors would not be resilient. Steenkamp et al.'s failure to observe resilience can easily be explained on purely methodological grounds. Most notably, their findings were probably heavily influenced by sampling bias. Additionally, their sample size was too small and had too much missing data for the kinds of latent trajectory modeling they attempted.

Language: en