ASPECTS - analysing trauma narratives in children and adolescents
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Analysis of trauma narratives from the ASPECTS prospective longitudinal study
IRAS ID
213699
Contact name
Richard Meiser-Stedman
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 8 months, 31 days
Research summary
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a distressing and impairing disorder that can effect children and adolescents well into their adult life. Our understanding of PTSD, and why some people develop it following a traumatic experience and others do not, is something researchers have only recently been exploring in children and adolescents. Psychological models of PTSD suggest that the way memories of a traumatic event are processed and stored is key to whether PTSD is developed or not; this seems to apply to children as it has been found to in adults. One way of assessing how someone has processed a traumatic event into their memory is to assess characteristics of their narrative or description of what happened.
The qualities of trauma narratives are thought to be related to underlying cognitive processes and symptoms in PTSD. Coherent and organised narratives of trauma suggest adaptive cognitive processing of the event and these narratives are related to PTSD recovery or resilience against PTSD development, however current research and evidence of this in child populations is sparse. The main aims of this project are to explore whether particular characteristics of trauma narratives that children and adolescents give in the weeks following a traumatic event, are predictive of the development of PTSD symptoms. The project will use recordings of trauma narratives which have already been collected as part of a previous study (ASPECTS). In ASPECTS, 226 children were interviewed to assess for PTSD symptoms, and they also gave narrative descriptions of their trauma. A proportion of these interviews were recorded. This previous study did not aim to assess these trauma narratives, and so this is the proposed remit of this current study. The sample size of the ASPECTS population provides a valuable addition to our understanding of trauma narratives and PTSD in young people.REC name
East of England - Cambridge Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/EE/0511
Date of REC Opinion
28 Dec 2016
REC opinion
Unfavourable Opinion