Replicability and generalizability of PTSD networks: A cross-cultural multisite study of PTSD symptoms in four trauma patient samples

The growing literature conceptualizing mental disorders like Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) asnetworks of interacting symptoms faces three key challenges. Prior studies predominantly used (a)small samples with low power for precise network estimation, (b) non-clinical samples, and (c) singlesamples. This renders network structures in clinical data, and the extent to which networks replicateacross datasets, unknown. To overcome these limitations, the present cross-cultural multisite studyestimated regularized partial correlation networks of 16 PTSD symptoms across four datasets oftraumatized patients receiving treatment for PTSD (total N=2,782), and compared resulting networks.Despite differences in culture, trauma-type and severity of the samples, considerable similaritiesemerged, with moderate to high correlations between symptom profiles (0.43 to 0.82), networkstructures (0.62 to 0.74), and centrality estimates (0.63 to 0.75). We discuss the importance of futurereplicability efforts to improve clinical psychological science, and provide code, model output, andcorrelation matrices to make the results of this paper fully reproducible.