IES

The Impact of Events Scale – IES (Horowitz, Wilner & Alvarez, 1979; Giorgi et al., 2015) is a validated measure of post-traumatic stress symptoms and assesses the frequency of intrusion and avoidance phenomena. The 6 items are rated on a 5-point scale, where 0 means “Not at all” and 4 means Extremely. Respondents are asked to identify a specific stressful life event (COVID-19 in this case), and then to indicate how much they were distressed or bothered during the last week by each “difficulty” listed (e.g., “I thought about it when I did not mean to” or “I had trouble concentrating”). High scores indicate a significant stress response.