Citation

Fried EI, Eidhof MB, Palic S, Costantini G, Huisman-van Dijk HM, Bockting CLH, Engelhard I, Armour C, Nielsen ABS, Karstoft KI. Clinical Psychological Science 2018; 6(3): 335-351.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/2167702617745092

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The growing literature conceptualizing mental disorders like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as networks of interacting symptoms faces three key challenges. Prior studies predominantly used (a) small samples with low power for precise estimation, (b) nonclinical samples, and (c) single samples. This renders network structures in clinical data, and the extent to which networks replicate across data sets, unknown. To overcome these limitations, the present cross-cultural multisite study estimated regularized partial correlation networks of 16 PTSD symptoms across four data sets of traumatized patients receiving treatment for PTSD (total N = 2,782). Despite differences in culture, trauma type, and severity of the samples, considerable similarities emerged, with moderate to high correlations between symptom profiles (0.43-0.82), network structures (0.62-0.74), and centrality estimates (0.63-0.75). We discuss the importance of future replicability efforts to improve clinical psychological science and provide code, model output, and correlation matrices to make the results of this article fully reproducible.

Language: en