Background: For more than 20 years, the Impact of Event Scale (IES) has been widely used as a measure of stress reactions after traumatic events.
Aims: To review studies that evaluated the IES's psychometric properties.
Method: Literature review.
Results: The results indicated that the IES's two-factor structure is stable over different types of events, that it can discriminate between stress reactions at different times after the event, and that it has convergent validity with observer-diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. The use of IES in many psychopharmacological trials and outcome studies is supportive of the measure's clinical relevance.
Conclusions: The IES is a useful measure of stress reactions after a range of traumatic events, and it is valuable for detecting individuals who require treatment.