Middle East conflicts have produced a large number of people
who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder symptoms.
Despite that, there are no short, easily administered self-report
validated questionnaire to assess war exposure to posttraumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) in Arabic. Only recently has
IES-R been translated into “Classical Arabic”, the language
used by highly educated populations, which is too difficult
for participants grounded in their particular “dialect”. The
aim of this work was to validate the Arabic version of IESR,
developed specifically for use in a refugee camp during
the Syrian conflict. IES-R is a self-report questionnaire for
adults measuring the subjective response to a specific traumatic
event. It has 22 items; 7 were added to the original
Horowitz IES to better assess the DSM criteria for PTSD:
intrusion, avoidance, hyperarousal. The original English version
has been translated in Arabic and then back-translated
to English. Two hundred eighty-eight Syrian refugees were
tested. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis supported
a four-factor solution (intrusion, avoidance-numbing,
hyperarousal, and sleep disturbance). Bootstrap resampling
were applied to assess the overall fit of the competing models.
Total IES-R scores of our war-exposed civilians was reliable
and symmetrically distributed around the average score of
44.72 (± 11.87) largely above the best cut-off for a probable
diagnosis of PTSD. The average items score of 2.06 (± 0.54)
was similar to values observed in other seriously traumatized
groups. In conclusion, the Arabic version of IES-R seems to
be a good measure of post-trauma for both research and intervention
studies.
