Victims of natural disasters are likely to suffer from many mental health problems, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety，depression and sleep disorder. Among them, PTSD is a common mental health problem in the aftermath of natural disasters so that there are a large number of potential victims in need to provide psychological screening. Thus, a good screening and assessment instrument of PTSD symptoms is very important for victims as well as clinicians and researchers of PTSD. However, the most commonly used criterion to define and establish psychiatric disorders and most of the instruments used in China were based on Western people and culture which is very different from that of Eastern like Chinese. Therefore, we decided, on the basis of our interview study, taken Chinese culture-specific symptoms into account, using Chinese’ own experiences, words and meanings as the foundation for the items, to develop an indigenous self-report scale - Chinese PTSD Inventory (CPI) as an instrument assessing PTSD among Chinese after natural disasters. Study one is a process of generating items for the initial inventory. Based on the coding result of interviews and taken the PTSD diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV-TR into account, 31 items were selected to make up the initial inventory. Study two is an item analysis and exploratory factor analysis study to form the formal questionnaire by administering the initial scale to a convenience sample of 313 adults from two temporary camp communities two years after the Sichuan earthquake. Finally, the formal scale was developed consisting of five dimensions which are intrusion, avoidance, dysphosia, hyperarsoual and somatization, and including 27 items with 4 items removed. Study three is aimed to test the reliability and validity of the formal scale and to examine the stability of its factor structure by using confirmatory factor analysis. A convenience sample of 227 adults two months after a large-scale debris flow participated in the investigation with 31 participants randomly selected to do the test again after two weeks for test-retest reliability. The The development of a Chinese PTSD Inventory for Natural Disaster Victims results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed the fit index for the five factor structure was satisfactory which demonstrated the good stability of the factor structure of the scale. Meanwhile, the internal consistency reliability coefficient of total scale is high and the test-retest reliability is acceptable. And the strong correlation between the total PCL-C and CPI scores proves the good convergent validity of the scale. Then, the characteristics of this scale were discussed with focus on the factor structure of the scale and one important factor for Chinese-Somatization. At last, limitations of this research were addressed and directions for further research were suggested.
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