Development and Exploratory Factor Analysis of Trauma-Related Blame Scale

Abstract

Following interpersonal trauma, survivors often experience maladaptive trauma-related blame cognitions which have relevance for psychopathology and treatment. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association has included blame as a symptom of PTSD in its most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. At the present, there is a paucity of literature concerning the development, course and resolution of these cognitions. Unfortunately, this research has been stymied by the limitations of existing measures, being rooted in a single trauma type and primarily regarding self-blame. The aim of the present study was to develop a trauma-related blame scale for survivors which could be employed to assess blame in any type of interpersonal traumatic experience and would include subscales for various blame typologies. Trauma-related blame items were developed to target attributions about the self, trauma-perpetrators, other victims, traumarelated others, higher-power entities, or no-one at all. Following the generation of 767 items, feedback from subject matter experts, and necessary modifications to the measure after content analysis, items were administered to a mixed interpersonal trauma population via a web-based crowdsourcing participant pool. Then, an exploratory factor analysis was performed on a final dataset containing responses of N = 458 participants to assess the degrees to which items load on intended blame subscales, resulting in a total 89 items at final reduction and eight factors: Higher-Power-Blame, No-one, Behavioral SelfBlame, Perpetrator Intent, Characterological Perpetrator-Blame, Perpetrator-Blame, Other-Blame, and Characterological Self-Blame. The next stage of this research should examine the construct validity and further validation within clinical populations.