Development and Exploratory Factor Analysis of Trauma-Related Blame Scale

A Plan B Research Project submitted to the faculty of University of Minnesota Duluth by Jeremy D. Jamieson in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, June 2020. Advisor: Catherine M. Reich.Following interpersonal trauma, survivors often experience maladaptive trauma-related blame cognitions which have relevance for psychopathology and treatment. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association has included blame as a symptom of PTSD in its most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. At the present, there is a paucity of literature concerning the development, course and resolution of these cognitions. Unfortunately, this research has been stymied by the limitations of existing measures, being rooted in a single trauma type and primarily regarding self-blame. The aim of the present study was to develop a trauma-related blame scale for survivors which could be employed to assess blame in any type of interpersonal traumatic experience and would include subscales for various blame typologies. Trauma-related blame items were developed to target attributions about the self, trauma-perpetrators, other victims, traumarelated others, higher-power entities, or no-one at all. Following the generation of 767 items, feedback from subject matter experts, and necessary modifications to the measure after content analysis, items were administered to a mixed interpersonal trauma population via a web-based crowdsourcing participant pool. Then, an exploratory factor analysis was performed on a final dataset containing responses of N = 458 participants to assess the degrees to which items load on intended blame subscales, resulting in a total 89 items at final reduction and eight factors: Higher-Power-Blame, No-one, Behavioral SelfBlame, Perpetrator Intent, Characterological Perpetrator-Blame, Perpetrator-Blame, Other-Blame, and Characterological Self-Blame. The next stage of this research should examine the construct validity and further validation within clinical populations