Validity, Reliability, and Factor Structure of the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale-French Version

Secondary traumatic stress (STS) is a syndrome including intrusion, avoidance, and arousal due to indirect trauma exposure (e.g., by caring for traumatized patients in a professional context or transgenerational transmission of trauma in familial or cultural systems). Bride et al. (1) developed the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale (STSS), designed to measure these reactions of helping professionals who have experienced traumatic stress through their work with their traumatized clients. This study aimed to validate the French version of the STSS (STSS-F) by evaluating factorial and criterion validity. Furthermore, its reliability and other psychometric properties were evaluated. Two-hundred-and-twenty midwives at two university hospitals in the French-speaking part of Switzerland completed an anonymous online survey. Midwives were chosen as study population because STS represents a serious professional risk in this population. In a series of confirmatory factor analyses and exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), a model with two correlated ESEM factors (i.e., intrusion, avoidance-arousal) provided the best model fit, thus establishing factorial validity. Differential associations of the STSS-F total score to general distress and posttraumatic stress and the utility of the STSS-F total score to account for variance in core dimensions of burnout beyond general distress, posttraumatic stress, perceived stress, occupational reward, and efforts supported the criterion validity of the STSS-F. The full STSS-F and its subscales showed acceptable to good levels of reliability. Limitations include the relatively small and homogeneous sample and the lack of tests of factorial invariance of the STSS-F and the original STSS. In conclusion, the present study provides evidence for the reliability and validity of the STSS-F. It makes the SSTS accessible to French speaking research contexts.