To overcome these limitations, childhood trauma can be conceptualized and operationalized within a latent variable framework. Here, observed items are defined as manifestations of latent variables that cannot be directly measured. The latent variables can be “modeled” using various psychometric and/or statistical measurement methodologies including higher order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). This method uses many items, each of which is given a different weight (i.e., factor loading) that represents the degree to which latent trauma variables are manifest in the observed item. Those components of observed items that are not related to the latent variables are held in the model residuals (to which sampling, measurement, and modeling error all contribute [Raudenbush and Bryk 2002; ]). Thus, this process removes some item‐level measurement error from the latent variables while creating a higher order factor that is multidimensional and continuously distributed along severity continua. Two studies (Scher et al. 2001; Spinhoven et al. 2014) have performed CFA using data collected with the widely used Childhood Trauma Questionnaire‐Short Form, a 28‐item retrospective self‐report measure from which five factors can be derived, each representing
