Indsamling af danske normer til Odense Child Trauma Screening (OCTS)

Background: Odense Child Trauma Screening (OCTS) is a validated story stem tool applicable for assessment of children aged 4-8 in risk of being traumatized. Danish norms are needed and can serve as baseline comparison for assessment of children at risk and will strengthen the clinical assessment. Therefore, we aimed to 1) collect norms for the OCTS and its entire coding scheme and 2) investigate potential sex and age differences. Methods: We tested 169 non-clinical children with the OCTS and obtained demographic information, data on psychosocial functioning, and history of trauma exposure from caregivers using The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and The Diagnostic Infant and Preschool Assessment (DIPA) trauma list. We divided our sample into groups of children aged 4, 5 and 6-8 since we were not able to recruit the intended number of children across all age levels. Results: Few significant age and sex differences in play-based behaviour and narrative representations during the OCTS were identified. Five were found in norm code scores between the sexes with boys scoring higher. No significant sex differences were found in OCTS partial or total scores. However, three significant age differences were found in norm partial scores and in OCTS total scores with 4-year-olds scoring higher than 6-8-year-olds. Further, 13 significant age differences were found in norm code scores with the younger of the two groups in question scoring consistently higher. Results thus suggest that, within our sample, OCTS scores tend to decrease with older age. Conclusion: The study contributes to the field of story stem-based psychological assessment by documenting that the OCTS works well in non-clinical children. Findings will aid clinicians in more accurately understanding and assessing individual children tested with the OCTS. As higher norm scores were generally found in the younger age groups, clinicians should be attentive to the influence of age in certain OCTS codes, partial and total scores. Gender biases were negligible. Future research on Danish norms for the OCTS should aim to include more children aged 6-8 years or aim to collect norms from larger representative samples. Future research should also study the play-based behaviour and narrative representations of other groups of children during the OCTS (e.g., children with developmental disorders) and explore how factors such as cognition, language abilities, and culture might influence children’s participation in the OCTS.