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 symptoms, and is a short, easily administered -report . 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 -IV criteria for PTSD (Weiss & Marmar, 1997). It is an appropriate instrument to measure the subjective response to a specific traumatic in an adult or senior . There are three subscales: intrusion (, nightmares, intrusive feelings and , dissociative-like re-experiencing), avoidance (numbing of responsiveness, avoidance of feelings, situations, and ideas), and hyperarousal (anger, , , difficulty concentrating, heightened startle), as well as a total subjective IES-R score.

Validity and Reliability

The IES-R was designed and validated using a specific traumatic as a reference in the directions to the while administering the tool and while using a specific time frame of the past seven days. The scale discriminates between a of traumatized groups from non-traumatized groups in general studies. The subscales of avoidance and intrusion show good . While related, the subscales measure different dimensions of response. African-Americans have been shown to score higher than European-Americans on the IES in general 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 with regard to (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 reactions at different times after the , and that it has with -diagnosed post-traumatic 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 from post traumatic , 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

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

This content is licensed under a CC-BY license. The CC-BY licenses grant rights of use the scales in your studies (the measurement instrument and its documentation), but do not replace copyright. This remains with the copyright holder, and you have to cite us as the source.

Mohammed Looti, PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES (2023) The Impact of Event Scale – Revised (IES-R). Retrieved from https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/the-impact-of-event-scale-revised-ies-r/. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.31575.96163