CARTS

Childhood Attachment and Relational Trauma Screen 

 

 

Project group

PI: Paul Frewen, PhD, C.Psych, Western University, Canada, e-mail: pfrewen-AT-gmail.com

Dean Ajdukovic, Anne Bakker, Doug Brewer, Marylene Cloitre, Grete Dyb, Paul Frewen, Juli Lanza, Brigitte Lueger Schuester, Gladys Mwiti, Misari Oe, Miranda Olff, Janaina Pinto, Rita Rosner, Carolina Salgado, Ingo Schaefer, Julia Schellong, Ueli Schnyder, Jun Shigemura, Kitty Wu.

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Background

The CARTS is a "computer-based self-report measure designed to assess overt instances of childhood maltreatment, as well as the general warmth, security and supportiveness of individuals within the respondents’ family and external environment" (Simonelli et al., 2017). It is a computerized survey of individuals’ recollections of the quality of their relationships with their family members during childhood, and of relational traumatic experiences occurring during childhood (Frewen et al., 2013, 2015).

The available assessment tools tend to overlook the socio-ecological and relational context of childhood trauma. For this reason developed the CARTS, as "an innovative assessment tool designed to measure instances of child abuse as well as warmth, security and support within the family, thus providing a socio-ecological relational perspective. This feature enables the evaluation of the subjective perception of the traumatic relational context, rather than only the frequency and severity of such experiences " (Simonelli et al., 2017), see also Olff et al., 2020).

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Aims

We are currently investigating the use of a novel online survey methodology assessing childhood trauma history called the Childhood Attachment and Relational Trauma Screen (CARTS) in several different languages and cultures.


Methods
You are invited to complete the CARTS as a survey about individuals’ recollections of the quality of their relationships with their family members during childhood, and of relational traumatic experiences occurring during childhood. 

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References   

 

Frewen, P. A., Evans, B., Goodman, J., Halliday, A., Boylan, J., Moran, G., … Lanius, R. A. (2013). Development of a childhood attachment and relational trauma screen (CARTS): Arelational-socioecological framework for surveying attachment security and childhood trauma history. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 4, 1–17. doi:10.3402/ejpt.v4i0.20232

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Frewen, P. A., Brown, M. F. D., De Pierro, J., D’Andrea, W., & Schore, A. (2015). Assessing the family dynamics of childhood maltreatment history with the childhood attachment and relational trauma screen (CARTS). European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 6(1), doi:  10.3402/ejpt.v6.27792.

 

Olff, M., Bakker, A.,  Frewen, P., Aakvaag, H., Ajdukovic, D., Brewer, D., Elmore Borbon, D.L., Cloitre, M., Hyland, P., Kassam-Adams, N., Knefel, M., Lanza, J.A., Lueger-Schuster, B., Nickerson, A., Oe, M., Pfaltz, M.C., Salgado, C., Seedat, S., Wagner, A.,  Schnyder, U. & Global Collaboration on Traumatic Stress (GC-TS) (2020). Screening for consequences of trauma – an update on the global collaboration on traumatic stress. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1), 1752504  https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2020.1752504

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Simonelli, A., Sacchi, C., Cantoni, L., Brown, M., & Frewen, P. A. (2017). Italian translation and cross-cultural comparison with the Childhood Attachment and Relational Trauma Screen (CARTS). European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 8(1). doi: 10.1080/20008198.2017.1375839

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© 2019 by Global Collaboration on Traumatic Stress