A cross-cultural study of different facets of dissociation: Validity and relationship with childhood trauma

Dissociative symptoms are often conceptualized as a response to childhood trauma. However, most previous studies did not consider dissociation as a multidimensional phenomenon and only focused on English-speaking samples.

To establish the cross-cultural validity of dissociation and examine the relationship of childhood trauma with different specific dissociative symptoms across two different samples.

Data from two surveys were analyzed (N = 781 Chinese-speaking adults and N = 468 English-speaking adults).

Participants completed the Childhood Trauma Subsection of the Brief Betrayal Trauma Survey and the Multiscale Dissociation Inventory (MDI) in their respective languages. We first established the measurement invariance of the MDI across the samples. Then, we examined the correlations between childhood trauma and different dimensions of dissociation.

The six-factor structure of MDI achieved configural, metric and scalar invariance across the samples. In both samples, childhood trauma was significantly correlated with all facets of dissociation (rs = 0.227 to 0.450, p < .001), after controlling for age and gender. While depersonalization (r = 0.450) had the strongest correlation with childhood trauma in the Chinese-speaking sample, memory disturbance (r = 0.333) had the strongest correlation with childhood trauma in the English-speaking sample.

Dissociation is a valid, multidimensional construct associated with childhood trauma across cultures. Yet, social and cultural factors might influence this relationship. Further studies on the complex relationship between childhood trauma and different specific dissociative symptoms, as well as possible moderators, are needed.