Social acknowledgment as a victim or survivor: a scale to measure a recovery factor of PTSD.

The development and validation of a new measure of social acknowledgment as a victim or survivor is presented, whose items were derived from previous research on social recovery factors of post-traumatic stress disorder. The Social Acknowledgment Questionnaire (SAQ) was administered to nontreatment seeking traumatized persons--178 former political prisoners in East Germany and 151 recently traumatized interpersonal crime victims. Principal components analysis yielded three factors--Recognition as victim, General disapproval, and Family disapproval. The factors showed high internal consistency and good test-retest reliability; correlated moderately to strong with measures of PTSD severity, social support, and reluctance to talk about the trauma. In comparison to a conventional measure of social support, the SAQ predicted comparably better between persons with high- and low-PTSD severity.