Do Measures of Posttrauma Factors Better Explain PTSD Severity Than Pretrauma Factors? An Empirical Reply to Ogle et al. (2016)

Ogle, Rubin, and Siegler (2016) concluded that postevent risk factors account for PTSD symptomatology much better than pretrauma factors. However, in their study several postevent predictors such as involuntary recall and physical reactions to trauma memory were related to and assessed simultaneously with PTSD symptomatology. Removing content-related items from the PTSD measure would, according to the authors, ensure that results were not being driven by potential content overlap. In the present prospective study (N = 887) we test their assumption that removing such items prevents that results are overlap driven. Correlational and multiple regression analyses showed that the associations between pre-event mental health and neuroticism on the one side and PTSD symptomatology on the other were equal regardless of if and which symptom cluster of PTSD was removed from our PTSD measure. Based on these findings we conclude that Ogle et al.’s assumption needs to be rejected.