A natural disaster negatively affects children's emotional and behavioral adjustment. The purpose of this paper was to examine the prevalence, symptoms, and correlates of PTSD after the occurrence of Typhoon Rusa.

261 elementary school children living in Kimcheon, which was a devastated rural area in South Korea by Typhoon Rusa, were selected. Data were collected 4 months after the disaster using the PTSD Reaction Index categories recommended by Frederick, severity of PTSD.

12.3% of the children had either moderate or severe PTSD symptoms; 22.7% reported mild symptoms; and the remaining 65% had sub-clinical symptoms of PTSD. The most frequent symptom was recurrenct fear(67.0%). 13% to 17.2% of children exhibited difficulty in concentration, sleep disturbance, and guilt feeling. The regression model of severity of PTSD was composed of the level of exposure to traumatic experiences, grade in school, gender, negative coping style, and social support, and explained 34.3% for PTSD symptoms. Exposure to traumatic experiences was the strongest factor of all predictors.

Emotional support from friends and coping style were correlated with PTSD severity. School-based interventions that emphasizes coping with disaster related problems and problem-solving may prove to be useful, and may aid in building close and supportive ties with teachers, classmates, and friends.

In South Korea, as growing the need of psychological support in disaster situation psychological assessment on stress after disaster is important to find out the factors affecting coping, and to plan intervention in the community.

The volunteers of Korea Redcross who live around K city, and the research team visited all homes at Jirye town, one of the high-impact area, 4 month after the typhoon. One of the family members who is over 18 years old, answered the self-report questionnaire composed of disaster experience, damage, exposure to traumatic event, and posttraumatic stress with IES-K (Impact of Event Scale-korea) He also, described his family members symptom related to re-experiencing, hyper-arousal, and avoidance. Six hundreds households were surveyed.

The prevalence of moderate to severe PTSD symptom was 36% of the subjects. The severity of PTSD was affected by gender, economic status and affected by damaged property, physical injury, worsening existing disease, getting infectious disease, amount of experienced traumatic event before disaster, warning, taking shelter, and subjects revealed differences in somatization as severity of PTSD. According to the description, community members had re-experiencing, hyper-arousal and avoidance.

At a rural area, South Korea, community members have suffered from psychological distress after disaster. So psychological interventions are required as affecting factors and also to plan for warning and shelter in disaster situation is needed for preventing PTSD.