Measuring the experience of social trauma: Development and evaluation of the Social Devaluation Questionnaire

Stressful events and conditions can affect mental health. However, the psychopathological consequences of adverse events depend on how individuals think and feel during these experiences. Current instruments assessing peritraumatic distress focus on dysfunctional appraisal types, negative emotions, and dissociative experiences with little or no attention to social emotions. To fill this gap, this study describes the development and initial psychometric evaluation of an instrument to assess the affective response to stressful or traumatic events that threaten a person's social status. Based on theoretical assumptions about reactions to social stressors, we developed the Social Devaluation Questionnaire (SODEQ) to assess the proposed affective state of social devaluation, consisting of specific emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological facets. We tested the SODEQ on data from four studies, three online surveys with convenience samples totaling about N = 1200 participants and one face-to-face survey with N = 511 Syrian refugees living in refugee camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. In each of the studies, social devaluation was assessed using a specific index event, i.e., emotional abuse, peer victimization, abandonment, and post-migration stress as a refugee. We found evidence for the reliability of the instrument and the validity of both the instrument and the construct. Factor analyses indicated that items clustered into highly correlated components but supported treating social devaluation as a unified affect. In each study, the SODEQ score was associated with both the severity of the index event and indicators of psychopathology, and social devaluation partially or fully mediated the relationship between event severity and outcomes. Social devaluation appears to be a meaningful construct representing an affective response to an intense social stressor that contributes to psychopathology. The SODEQ seems to be a valuable tool for identifying mechanisms behind symptoms resulting from threats to one's social integrity.