Clinician Administered PTSD Life Events Checklist

The Life Events Checklist (LEC) is a brief, 17-item, self-report measure designed to screen for potentially traumatic events in a respondent's lifetime. The LEC assesses exposure to 16 events known to potentially result in PTSD or distress and includes one item assessing any other extraordinarily stressful event not captured in the first 16 items. For each item, the respondent checks whether the event (a) happened to them personally, (b) they witnessed the event, (c) they learned about the event, (d) they are not sure if the item applies to them, and (e) the item does not apply to them. The LEC was developed concurrently with the Clinician Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS) and is administered before the CAPS. The LEC has demonstrated adequate psychometric properties as a stand-alone assessment of traumatic exposure, particularly when evaluating consistency of events that actually happened to a respondent. The LEC has also demonstrated convergent validity with measures assessing varying levels of exposure to potentially traumatic events and psychopathology known to relate to traumatic exposure. However, the LEC does not establish that the respondent has experienced an event with sufficient severity to meet DSM-IV criteria for a traumatic exposure (Criterion A1), and it does not assess peritraumatic emotional experiences (Criterion A2).