Table of Contents
Instructions:
Below is a list of difficulties people sometimes have after stressful life events. Please read each item, and then indicate how distressing each difficulty has been for you DURING THE PAST SEVEN DAYS with respect to (the event). How much were you distressed or bothered by these difficulties?
| Not at all | A little bit | Moderately | Quite a bit | Extemely | ||
| Any reminder brought back feelings about it | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I had trouble staying asleep | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| Other things kept making me think about it | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I felt irritable and angry | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I avoided letting myself get upset when I thought about it or was reminded of it | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I thought about it when I didn’t mean to | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I felt as if it hadn’t happened or wasn’t real | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I stayed away from reminders about it | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| Pictures about it popped into my mind | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I was jumpy and easily startled | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I tried not to think about it | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I was aware that I still had a lot of feelings about it, but I didn’t deal with them | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| My feelings about it were kind of numb | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I found myself acting or feeling as though I was back at that time | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I had trouble falling asleep | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I had waves of strong feelings about it | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| Not at all | A little bit | Moderately | Quite a bit | Extemely | ||
| I tried to remove it from my memory | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I had trouble concentrating | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| Reminders of it caused me to have physical reactions, such as sweating, trouble breathing, nausea, or a pounding heart | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I had dreams about it | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I felt watchful or on-guard | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| I tried not to talk about it | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
Description
The IES-R was designed as a measure of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, and is a short, easily administered self-report questionnaire. It can be used for repeated measurements over time to monitor progress. It is best used for recent and specific traumatic events. It has 22 questions, 5 of which were added to the original Horowitz (IES) to better capture the DSM-IV criteria for PTSD (Weiss & Marmar, 1997). It is an appropriate instrument to measure the subjective response to a specific traumatic event in an adult or senior population. There are three subscales: intrusion (intrusive thoughts, nightmares, intrusive feelings and imagery, dissociative-like re-experiencing), avoidance (numbing of responsiveness, avoidance of feelings, situations, and ideas), and hyperarousal (anger, irritability, hypervigilance, difficulty concentrating, heightened startle), as well as a total subjective stress IES-R score.
Validity and Reliability
The IES-R was designed and validated using a specific traumatic event as a reference in the directions to the patient while administering the tool and while using a specific time frame of the past seven days. The scale discriminates between a variety of traumatized groups from non-traumatized groups in general population studies. The subscales of avoidance and intrusion show good internal consistency. While related, the subscales measure different dimensions of stress response. African-Americans have been shown to score higher than European-Americans on the IES in general population studies, an effect that diminished with increasing relative violence. This finding should be taken into account during interpretation. The hyperarousal subscale added by Weiss and Marmar has good predictive validity with regard to trauma (Briere, 1997), while the intrusion and avoidance subscales detect relevant differences in the clinical response to traumatic events of varying severity. Sundin and Horomitz (2002) showed that the IES’s two-factor structure is stable over different types of events, that it can discriminate between stress reactions at different times after the event, and that it has convergent validity with observer-diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.
Interpretation
Results consist of a total raw score, and raw scores for three subscales: The Avoidance Scale, Intrusion Scale, and the Hyperarousal Scale. Additionally the mean rating for the total score and each subscale is presented, which gives an indication of the level of impairment from post traumatic stress, where: 0 = No symptoms 1 = Few symptoms 2 = Moderate symptoms 3 = A High level of symptoms 4 = An Extremely high level of symptoms
Developer
Weiss, D.S., & Marmar, C.R. (1997). The Impact of Event Scale-Revised. In J.P. Wilson, & T.M. Keane (Eds.), Assessing Psychological Trauma and PTSD: A Practitioner’s Handbook (pp. 399-411).
New York: Guilford Press.The original Impact of events Scale (IES) was developed in the 1980s
Number Of Questions
22
References
Briere (1997) Sundin and Horomitz (2002) Weiss & Marmar (1997)
Developer Reference:
Weiss, D.S., & Marmar, C.R. (1997). The Impact of Event Scale-Revised. In J.P. Wilson, &
T.M. Keane (Eds.), Assessing Psychological Trauma and PTSD: A Practitioner’s Handbook (pp. 399-411). New York: Guilford Press.The original Impact of events Scale (IES) was developed in the 1980s