Development of a wartime stressor scale for women.

Prior research has demonstrated the importance of stressor measurement as a component of evaluating posttraumatic stress disorder. Much of the work conducted in this area has focused on male combat veterans, resulting in the development of several combat exposure scales. The nature of war-zone exposure for women, however, has not been systematically addressed. This article describes the development and preliminary psychometric analyses of the Women's Wartime Stressor Scale (WWSS), an instrument designed to measure the self-report of wartime stressors by both theater and era veterans as well as civilian women who served in Vietnam. Measurement of internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and construct validity points to the potential clinical and research utility of this type of instrument