1.2.2. Childhood trauma

The Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ) is a brief, 28‐item self‐report questionnaire used for screening for childhood maltreatment in adults retrospectively (Bernstein et al., 2003).

CTQ comprises five subscales: Emotional Abuse, Physical Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Emotional Neglect, and Physical Neglect. Items are scored from “never true” (score 1) to “very often true” (score 5). Seven items are reverse scored (2, 5, 7, 13, 19, 26, and 28). The validity and reliability of the Persian version of CTQ were evaluated by Garrusi and Nakhaee (2009) who reported acceptable psychometric properties. In this study, Cronbach's α for the subscales was as follows: Emotional Abuse = .81, Sexual Abuse = .82, Emotional Neglect = .87, Physical Neglect = .54, and Physical Abuse = .56.