Title: The correspondence of daily and retrospective PTSD reports among female victims of sexual assault.
Abstract: Research addressing the association between daily and retrospective symptom reports suggests that retrospective reports are typically inflated.The current study examined the association between daily PTSD symptom reports over one month and a corresponding retrospective report (PTSD Checklist [PCL]; Weathers et al., 1993) for both total scores and symptom clusters.We hypothesized that greater PTSD symptom instability and greater depression would be associated with poorer daily-retrospective agreement.Data were collected from 132 female college students who were sexually assaulted.Multilevel modeling indicated very strong agreement between mean daily and retrospective reports for total scores and symptom clusters, with pseudo-R 2 ranging from .55 to .77.Depression symptoms did not moderate this association, but daily-retrospective agreement was lowest for the avoidance cluster, which was also the most unstable.Finally, retrospective recall for each symptom cluster showed acceptable specificity to the corresponding daily symptom clusters.Overall, these findings suggest that retrospective memories for global PTSD symptoms and symptom clusters, as assessed by the PCL, are consistent with daily reports over a one month period.Implications for clinical assessment methodology are discussed.Across clinical and research settings, the vast majority of psychopathology assessment involves retrospective methodology.However, the expedience of using retrospective measures may come at the cost of decreased accuracy relative to real-time assessment.When individuals attempt to reconstruct their average experience of symptoms over time, they may answer based on numerous heuristic strategies, such as one's generic construction of oneself (Gorin & Stone, 2001), recent or extreme experiences (e.g.,