This method was chosen so that multiple nominations of the same event would not be counted when the participant was interviewed more than once. Dummy variables representing each participant’s experience of physical assault, sexual assault, non-assaultive trauma, and/or witnessed violence prior to age 18 were created, where 1 indicated experiencing that form of trauma exposure and 0 indicated no experience of that specific trauma. A diagnosis of PTSD was made based on DSM-IV criteria of re-experiencing, avoidance, and hyper arousal that lasted at least one month based on a physical assault, sexual assault, non-assaultive trauma, or witnessed violence trauma that occurred before the respondent was 18. The DSM-5 has revised the diagnostic criteria by increasing the number of overall symptoms from 17 to 20 and adding a fourth symptom cluster which essentially separated the avoidance and numbing symptoms into two separate groups (Pai, Suris & North, 2017). However, it was not possible to apply DSM-5 criteria to the PTSD section in SSAGA-IV; therefore, we use and report the DSM-IV posttraumatic stress and PTSD criteria in this study.
