Prospective Trajectories of Posttraumatic Stress in College Women Following a Campus Mass Shooting

Abstract

In a sample with known levels of preshooting posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms, we examined the impact of a campus mass shooting on trajectories of PTS in the 31 months following the shooting using latent growth mixture modeling. Female students completed 7 waves of a longitudinal study (sample sizes ranged from 812 to 559). We identified 4 distinct trajectories (n = 660): (a) minimal impact-resilience (60.9%), (b) high impact-recovery (29.1%), (c) moderate impact-moderate symptoms (8.2%), and (d) chronic dysfunction (1.8%). Individuals in each trajectory class remained at or returned to preshooting levels of PTS approximately 6 months postshooting. The minimal impact-resilience class reported less prior trauma exposure (η(2) = .13), less shooting exposure (η(2) = .07), and greater emotion regulation skills than all other classes (η(2) > .30). The chronic dysfunction class endorsed higher rates of experiential avoidance prior to the shooting than the minimal-impact resilient and high impact-recovery classes (η(2) = .15), as well as greater shooting exposure than the high impact-recovery class (η(2) = .07). Findings suggest that preshooting functioning and emotion regulation distinguish between those who experience prolonged distress following mass violence and those who gradually recover.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 123 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.