Psychological symptoms of Turkish children and adolescents after the 1999 earthquake: exposure, gender, location, and time duration.

The authors describe their study of posttraumatic stress symptoms of children and adolescents after the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey. The rate of possible PTSD cases is also presented. The findings are reported as the results of two different studies. Location had a main effect on almost all of the dependent variables for both samples. The posttraumatic stress symptom scores for both groups significantly decreased 3 months after the initial assessment. The best predictors of the perceived posttraumatic stress symptoms for both children and adolescents were found to be perceived negative school performance and exposure.