CAP-Assessment Core Boston

Va Boston Health Care System, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Assessment Core has four main objectives that support proposed and future clinical trials and epidemiological studies: (1) to create uniformity of instrumentation and measurement and to employ state-of- the-art measures with sound psychometric properties; (2) to ensure measurement of outcome and predictor variables that are relevant and sensitive to the active duty military ethos and culture as well as Veterans' experiences; (3) to train and to provide oversight and supervision of Independent Evaluators (IEs), to adjudicate diagnostic decisions for clinical trials when necessary, to conduct inter-rater reliability evaluations of taped PTSD interviews, and to shape IEs over time to obviate drift; and (4) to work with the Data and Epidemiological Cores to create a data dictionary and to manage and leverage the omnibus multi-study dataset. Our team has specialized expertise in the assessment of war-trauma (Litz, 2007; Litz & Schlenger, 2009; Steenkamp et al., 2010; Stein et al., 2012) and has extensive experience measuring risk and resilience in the military over the life-course (Baker et al., 2012; Dickstein et al., 2010). The infrastructure created under STRONG STAR is well-equipped to effectively oversee the measurement and assessment needs for STRONG STAR-CAP. To date, we have selected outcome and predictor variables that are state-of-the-art and that provide content coverage across multiple domains while respecting Service Members' and Veterans time-and- effort constraints. We were especially mindful of the latter and chose briefer options whenever possible. Ronald Acierno at the Charleston VA Medical Center/Medical University South Carolina has organized an informal research Consortium consisting of approximately 10 non-NCPTSD investigators located at VAs throughout the US (see Table 5) who are committed to partnering with the Assessment Core and the STRONG STAR-CAP. All of the investigators have current VA, DoD, or NIH funding to support their PTSD research. A primary interest of this group is to help ensure that a set of Common Data Elements (Kaloupek et al., 2010) are collected across all DoD and VA STRONG STAR-CAP-affiliated studies (e.g., common psychological construct domains, biomarkers, etc.). They have titled their effort the Coalition of VA/DoD PTSD CAP Study Site Partners for Common Data Elements.