ArticleJournal of traumatic stress2022
Estimating posttraumatic stress disorder severity in the presence of differential item functioning across populations, comorbidities, and interview measures: Introduction to Project Harmony.
Article in Journal of traumatic stress, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 22 citations in OpenAlex.
- Treatment for co-occurring posttraumatic stress disorder and substance use disorders among veterans and civilians: A test of causally moderated comparative effectiveness.Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy · 2026Pooled it
- Cannabis use and trauma-focused treatment for co-occurring posttraumatic stress disorder and substance use disorders: A meta-analysis of individual patient data.Journal of anxiety disorders · 2024Pooled it
- Pooling data from studies on prolonged grief: the Multi-region Archive of Research data on Bereavement and Loss from Empirical Studies (MARBLES) project.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- Project Harmony 2.0: protocol for an updated and expanded individual patient data meta-analysis and virtual clinical trial of treatments for comorbid PTSD and substance use disorders.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- Impaired but now diagnosable: Combining analytic frameworks for incorporating symptom weighting in the classification of full-threshold and subthreshold posttraumatic stress disorder.Journal of traumatic stress · 2026Article
- Advancing PTSD-Substance Use Comorbidity Treatment Research Through Applying FAIR and FACT Data Science Frameworks inJournal of studies on alcohol and drugs · 2026Article
- Severe PTSD or just PTSD?European journal of psychotraumatology · 2025Article
- Being Mindful About Overuse of Total Scores: a Comparison of Total Scores and Moderated Nonlinear Factor Analysis Scores in Assessing Mindfulness Across Race/Ethnicity, Age, and PTSD Diagnosis.Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research · 2025Article
- How changes in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) severity mediate substance use disorder (SUD) severity during and after treatment for co-occurring PTSD and SUD: Results from Project Harmony.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Observational
- Advances, challenges, and future directions in trauma-related Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) data efforts.Journal of traumatic stress · 2025Review
- World Health Organization risk drinking level reductions as treatment outcomes in PTSD and substance use disorder trials.Drug and alcohol dependence · 2025Article
- A Framework for Estimating Posttreatment Moderation of Treatment-by-Dosage Effects in Individual-Patient Meta-Analysis: An Illustration Using Project Harmony.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Are we gatekeeping trauma? A conceptual model to expand criterion A for invisible, identity-based, and systemic traumas.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Review
- The Hidden Psychometric Model Underlying thePsychiatric services (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Article
- Integrative data analysis of clinical trials network studies to examine the impact of psychosocial treatments for black people who use cocaine: Study protocol.Contemporary clinical trials · 2023Article
- Differential symptom weighting in estimating empirical thresholds for underlying PTSD severity: Toward a "platinum" standard for diagnosis?International journal of methods in psychiatric research · 2023Article
- Cumulative exposure to traumatic events and craving among women in residential treatment for substance use disorder: The role of emotion dysregulation and mindfulness disposition.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
13 authors at 8 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Multiple factor analytic and item response theory studies have shown that items/symptoms vary in their relative clinical weights in structured interview measures for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite these findings, the use of total scores, which treat symptoms as though they are equally weighted, predominates in practice, with the consequence of undermining the precision of clinical decision-making. We conducted an integrative data analysis (IDA) study to harmonize PTSD structured interview data (i.e., recoding of items to a common symptom metric) from 25 studies (total N = 2,568). We aimed to identify (a) measurement noninvariance/differential item functioning (MNI/DIF) across multiple populations, psychiatric comorbidities, and interview measures simultaneously and (b) differences in inferences regarding underlying PTSD severity between scale scores estimated using moderated nonlinear factor analysis (MNLFA) and a total score analog model (TSA). Several predictors of MNI/DIF impacted effect size differences in underlying severity across scale scoring methods. Notably, we observed MNI/DIF substantial enough to bias inferences on underlying PTSD severity for two groups: African Americans and incarcerated women. The findings highlight two issues raised elsewhere in the PTSD psychometrics literature: (a) bias in characterizing underlying PTSD severity and individual-level treatment outcomes when the psychometric model underlying total scores fails to fit the data and (b) higher latent severity scores, on average, when using DSM-5 (net of MNI/DIF) criteria, by which multiple factors (e.g., Criterion A discordance across DSM editions, changes to the number/type of symptom clusters, changes to the symptoms themselves) may have impacted severity scoring for some patients.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.