Trauma researchers often make claims about the severity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) across populations, and yet cross-cultural measurement invariance (MI) is rarely assessed. Nine youth samples with Harvard Trauma Questionnaire (HTQ) responses were grouped based on sampling strategy used into two sets: representative (Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Lithuania, n = 1,457), and convenience (Greenland, India, Kenya, Malaysia, and Uganda, n = 2,036). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to gauge whether configural, metric, scalar, and residual invariance of different models held between national samples within the two sets. Configural invariance held for most PTSD models in convenience samples, not in representative samples. Metric invariance was less common, and scalar and residual in general did not hold. Cultural similarity between samples seemed to be associated with invariance. Findings suggest that although PTSD symptoms may cluster similarly across culturally distal groups, comparisons of the severity of symptoms using the HTQ across adolescent samples are not likely valid.

创伤研究人员经常对不同人群的创伤后应激障碍 (PTSD) 的严重程度做出声明，但很少评估跨文化测量不变性 (MI)。根据使用的抽样策略将 9 个具有哈佛创伤问卷 (HTQ) 响应的青年样本分为两组：代表性（丹麦、法罗群岛、冰岛和立陶宛，n = 1,457）和便利性（格陵兰、印度、肯尼亚、马来西亚） , 和乌干达, n= 2,036）。验证性因素分析 (CFA) 用于衡量两组国家样本之间不同模型的配置、度量、标量和剩余不变性是否保持不变。大多数 PTSD 模型在便利样本中保持配置不变性，而不是在代表性样本中。度量不变性不太常见，标量和残差一般不成立。样本之间的文化相似性似乎与不变性有关。研究结果表明，尽管 PTSD 症状可能在不同文化背景的人群中相似地聚集在一起，但使用 HTQ 对青少年样本的症状严重程度进行比较不太可能有效。