Psychometric properties of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form (CTQ-SF) in adolescents from the Peruvian Amazon

Childhood trauma is a significant public health problem owing to its effects on the socioemotional development of adolescents, which calls for validated assessment instruments. This study aimed to adapt and examine the psychometric properties of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire-Short Form (CTQ-SF) in adolescents from the Peruvian Amazon. An instrumental, cross-sectional study was conducted with 878 adolescents aged 12-17 years (M = 14.0; SD = 1.46) from public secondary schools in the San Martín Region, Peru, randomly divided into two subsamples of 439 participants each for exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA); reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and measurement invariance across sex were also examined. The original five-factor model did not show adequate performance. After removing items with weak loadings or redundant content, a three-factor, 18-item structure emerged-lack of perceived family support/neglect, sexual abuse, and physical-emotional abuse-which showed adequate fit (CFI = 0.958; TLI = 0.951; RMSEA = 0.051; SRMR = 0.067) and satisfactory internal consistency (ordinal α and ω = 0.76-0.95). Convergent validity was adequate for sexual abuse and physical-emotional abuse (AVE = 0.81 and 0.50) and borderline for lack of perceived family support/neglect (AVE = 0.42), whereas discriminant validity was supported for all factor pairs (HTMT = 0.262-0.626). Full scalar invariance across sex was also established (ΔCFI ≤ 0.002; ΔRMSEA ≤ 0.003). These findings indicate that the Peruvian CTQ-SF is better represented by a three-factor correlated structure, yielding a brief version that allows comparisons between sexes; nevertheless, because its temporal stability and external validity remain to be examined, its use should currently be restricted to research and preliminary screening purposes.