Investigating the Veracity of Self-Perceived Posttraumatic Growth: A Profile Analysis Approach to Corroboration

Research into posttraumatic growthpositive psychological change that people report in their relationships, priorities in life, and self-perception after experiences of adversityhas been severely critiqued. We investigated the degree to which community members' friends and relatives corroborated targets' self-perceived positive and negative changes as measured by the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory-42. We found corroboration only for negative changes when we examined overall (averaged) scores. However, using a profile analysis procedure, we found significant participant-informant agreement on the domains of change that had relatively higher scores in the target's profile and those that had relatively lower scores. Our results demonstrate that informants were able to observe that targets had changed and were sensitive to the idiosyncratic ways in which these changes had manifested in targets' behavior.