Comparing Vulnerability to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder among War Research Paper

Comparing Vulnerability to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder among War Veterans and the General Population and Gender Differences in Developing the Disorder - Research Paper Example This criterion was based on the fact that it would be almost impossible to get members of the general public who have been to battlefields, majorly because the number of such participants is merely restricted to victims of war, journalists, and aid workers all of who are deemed to comprise a very small proportion of the population. This decision was also motivated by the fact that in the present survey, none of the non-veteran participants indicated as having served in any warzones for any length of time. Using this criterion, the average length of time spent in warzones by the participants was 12.9 (std. dev. = 19.07) months. While some veteran participants had never been to warzones, the longest amount of time served in such regions by any of the participants was 60 months. Uncharacteristically, the standard deviation for this data is larger than the mean, implying that the rate of variation form the mean was particularly huge. The inferential tests were undertaken at the 5% level of significance. Ten out of the 13 participants diagnosed with PTSD were veterans, signifying that this group made up 76.92% of all cases of the condition diagnosed within the sample. The non-veterans were, therefore, more likely to fail the PTSD test, recording 13 (72.2%) of all failed PTSD tests. Using the ‘chitest’ function in Excel, the significance of associations between pairs of variables was assessed. The association between veteran status for individuals and PTSD prevalence was statistically significant (χ2 = 7.30, df = 1, p = 0.007). Clearly, the above result confirms the significance of the difference in the ratios indicated above, with the implication that the prevalence of PTSD was significantly higher among veterans than among the non-veterans. The Pearson chi square value for the association between PTSD status (either being diagnosed with the condition or failing to show signs for the same) and gender