Brief Trauma Screening In Real-World Practice: Psychometric Evidence for the IES-6 In Sexual Violence Services

Background and Purpose: Community-based sexual violence services need brief, low-burden measures that can support intake screening without overwhelming survivors or staff. Yet feasibility alone is not enough; measures used in routine care must also show defensible psychometric performance in the populations and settings where they are applied. Although the Impact of Event Scale-6 (IES-6) is widely used as a brief indicator of trauma-related distress, its utility in sexual violence service settings remains underexamined. This study evaluated the psychometric performance of the IES-6 in routine intake practice and tested whether scores function comparably across men and women.

Methods: Secondary analyses used de-identified archival intake data collected between 2010 and 2022 from a community-based trauma service network in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. The final analytic sample included 893 adult survivors of sexual violence (451 men, 442 women), drawn from a larger administrative database of 2,986 intake records after restricting analyses to adults with sufficient item-level data on the IES-R item pool and DASS-21. Participants completed IES-R items from which the IES-6 was derived, along with the DASS-21. Analyses included confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), Cronbach’s alpha, correlations with DASS-21 Depression, Anxiety, and Stress, a known-groups comparison by partner status, and multi-group CFA to test configural, metric, and scalar invariance across gender.

Results: A one-factor CFA model with two theory-consistent correlated residuals demonstrated acceptable fit, χ²(7) = 34.41, CFI = .983, TLI = .964, RMSEA = .066, SRMR = .028. Standardized factor loadings were all statistically significant and ranged from .46 to .81. Internal consistency was good (α = .81). IES-6 scores correlated very strongly with the full IES-R total score (r = .932, p < .001) and moderately with DASS-21 Depression (r = .507), Anxiety (r = .550), and Stress (r = .541), supporting convergent validity. Participants who were not partnered reported higher IES-6 scores than partnered participants, t(749) = -3.28, p = .001, d = 0.26. Multi-group CFA supported metric invariance across men and women, but scalar invariance was not supported, indicating that cross-gender comparisons of associations are more defensible than direct comparisons of observed mean scores.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings support the IES-6 as a feasible, psychometrically defensible brief indicator of trauma-related distress for routine intake screening in community-based sexual violence services. At the same time, the invariance findings identify an important interpretive boundary: the measure appears suitable for within-group use, screening, and practice-based assessment, but gender-based mean comparisons should be made cautiously. For social work measurement and practice, the study offers a concrete example of why real-world feasibility and psychometric defensibility must be evaluated together before brief tools are used to guide interpretation in service systems.