6. Kristen Alexander and colleagues were interested in whether the impact of a traumatic event (child sexual abuse) predicts (explains) one’s subsequent memory of that event

(Alexander et al., 2005). In that study the researchers were interested in whether the severity of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms helped explain how accurate abuse victims were in recalling the details of their abuse 12-21 years later. The file “Alexander et al abuse.sav” includes data designed to simulate some of the important variables in that study. The outcome variable Ncorrect is the number of details of the abuse recalled correctly. Sex was coded 0 for male victims, 1 for female; Support was the presence of maternal support for abuse disclosure (0=no, 1=yes); MTE was whether their sexual abuse was the most traumatic event they every experienced (0=no, 1=yes);

NPTSD was the number of criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder currently met. The NPTSD scale ranged from 0 to 9 in the simulated data, and included criteria such as re-experiencing events and impairment in daily life. Use multiple regression to determine whether these variables are important in explaining memory accuracy (Ncorrect). Test for an interaction between MTE and NPTSD in their effect on Ncorrect.

Conduct needed followup analyses (e.g., graphing and separate regressions). Explain your findings, in English; that is, what do these results mean?