Assessing the Scaling Properties of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ-SF) among Brazilian Adolescents

Background: The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire - Short Form (CTQ-SF) is widely used to assess childhood abuse and neglect in adolescents, but its scaling properties, meaning the ability of its subscales to form coherent and progressively ordered severity structures, have not yet been investigated.Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the scaling properties, namely scalability and monotonicity, of the CTQ-SF among adolescents.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted with a probabilistic, stratified sample of 721 adolescents from public and private schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Brazilian Portuguese version of the CTQ-SF was administered to assess five trauma dimensions: physical neglect (PN), emotional neglect (EN), physical abuse (PA), sexual abuse (SA), and emotional abuse (EA). Mokken Scale Analysis was applied to assess scalability, using Loevinger’s coefficients, as well as latent and double monotonicity. Gradient maps were generated to visualize the scalability of the items and subscales.Results: PA and SA exhibited strong scalability and met both latent and double monotonicity assumptions, supporting their utility in severity-based assessments. EN and EA also demonstrated strong scalability, though some items showed violations of latent and double monotonicity. PN displayed very weak scalability and serious violations of monotonicity, indicating poor alignment with a unidimensional, progressively increasing construct of physical neglect.Conclusion: Overall, the findings support the use of the PA, SA, EN, and EA subscales in adolescent populations, while highlighting the need for conceptual and operational revision of the PN subscale. As the first study to examine the scaling properties of the CTQ-SF, replication in diverse cultural and developmental contexts is recommended.