Dissociation: Short Version

Seventeen statements give a brief overview of dissociative experience: becoming absorbed and losing track of the surroundings, having gaps in memory for one's own actions, and feeling detached from oneself or the world.

Dissociation is understood as a continuum from everyday absorption to the experiences seen in dissociative disorders (Bernstein and Putnam, 1986). The statements here are a subset of the public-domain International Personality Item Pool (IPIP) dissociation items, chosen to represent the full scale in shorter form.

The ratings are combined into a single score. Lower scores describe infrequent, mostly absorptive experiences; higher scores describe more frequent and more varied dissociation. As with the full scale, a high score suggests that further assessment may be useful and is not a diagnosis.

The short version is used where time is limited. On this site, the Dissociation: Full Scale is the longer form, the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES-II) is the standard clinical measure, and the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5) measures posttraumatic stress, which often accompanies dissociation.

Items capture the core dissociation construct (absorption, depersonalization, amnesia) with adequate face and content validity for research screening purposes.

“Had the experience of feeling as though I was standing next to myself, or watching myself as if I was looking at a different person.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a percent of the maximum possible score. No normative percentile is applied — there is no verbatim-matched published norm for this exact item set.