The Trauma Symptom Inventory (TSI) is a Psychological evaluation/assessment instrument that taps symptoms of Posttraumatic stress disorder and other posttraumatic emotional problems. It was originally published in 1995 by its developer, John Briere. It is one of the most widely used measures of posttraumatic symptomatology.
The TSI is relatively unique in comparison to other measures of posttraumatic symptomatology, in that it is a multi-scale instrument, including 10 scales of various forms of clinical psychopathology related to psychological trauma. Also unique, it has three validity scales in order to assess the trauma victim's test-taking attitude, such as overreporting, underreporting and inconsistency; however, research demonstrates that the TSI does not achieve excellent accuracy in detecting the Malingering of posttraumatic stress disorder from genuine PTSD.
Original psychometric data on the TSI demonstrated adequate internal consistency (alphas ranging from .84 to .87). Validity with a civilian trauma-exposed sample has been demonstrated, with substantial relationships found between the TSI's clinical scale scores and other established measures of PTSD. Further corroboration of the TSI's psychometric properties, with trauma-exposed military veterans, was recently documented.
More recently, a second edition of the TSI was published (TSI-2), with limited research investigating its performance thus far.