1. Vicarious Trauma: A Comparison of Court Staff and College Students
Ladonna Lewis and Kirsten Lewis
Glendale Community College, AZ and KSL Research, Training, and Consultation LLC
Introduction
Method
Results
Previous research has demonstrated that constant exposure to crime and suffering comes at an emotional cost for the professionals who work with criminal offenders (Follette, Polusny, & Milbeck (1994)). While much of the previous research in this area has focused on the police officers and therapists who work with offenders, there is little research focusing on those who work in community corrections to include probation and parole officers. In their 2013 study, Lewis, Lewis, & Garby created a Probation Personal Impacts Questionnaire (PPI) for use with probation officers. The PPI was designed to assess the ways probation officers are personally impacted by daily exposure to criminal behavior, however the levels of the mistrust and changes in worldview measured by the PPI in the general public are not known.
Since the creation of the PPI, data have been collected from various types of court employees (probation officers, judges, court reporters, administrators and managers) using audience response systems. This technology was employed while the court personnel were being educated about trauma exposure and resilience. The use of an audience response system allowed participants to see the responses of the group while individual responses were anonymous, however the lack of a comparison group of non-court employee participants was notable.
The current study was intended to extend the work of Lewis, Lewis, & Garby (2013) in three ways. First, little is known about the degree of trauma exposure and the symptoms of secondary and vicarious trauma in a population outside of human service professions. Having a normative group so that the court employees can see how they compare and contrast was the first goal. A second goal was to investigate whether or not court employees were significantly different from a non-court employed population in their experience of secondary trauma symptoms and vicarious trauma symptoms. Third, we were interested in resilience and how that might be manifested differently for court employees because of the nature of their work.
Hypotheses:
College students will report lower levels of exposure to secondary traumatic events than do court employees, and college students will report fewer symptoms of secondary trauma than court employees.
College students will report lower levels of vicarious trauma than do court employees, and college students will report fewer symptoms of vicarious trauma than court employees.
College students will report fewer resilience factors than court employees.
Stress Symptoms Last 2 Months
How Often Exposed to Traumatic Material
Materials
Participants were told they would be hearing a lecture about stress as part of their PSY101 (Introduction to Psychology) class. Each student was given an informed consent form, and if they chose to participate in the data collection, they were given an audience response system device (a clicker) with which they would respond to several questions during the approximately 20 min. lecture. All students had to listen to the lecture as it was a normal part of the class.
Embedded in the PowerPoint presentation on stress were question slides for the collection of data, and Turning Technologies software and clickers were used to collect the answers from the students. All data were anonymous.
Example questions:
Describe your current level of stress.
How many symptoms of stress have you experienced in the last two months?
In the course of your day, how often are you exposed to traumatic material?
How many secondary traumatic events have you experienced in your career (or in your adult life)?
How many symptoms of secondary trauma have you experienced in the past two months?
How many symptoms of vicarious trauma have you experienced in the past two months?
Symptoms of Secondary Trauma
Symptoms of Vicarious Trauma
Number of Resilience Factors
Results
Discussion
Because the data were frequencies, we used a Chi Square Goodness of Fit analysis to evaluate our hypotheses. The percentages reported by the national sample were used to establish the appropriate expected frequencies for the college student sample.
The results are shown in the table below.
Our hypothesis that college students would report lower levels of vicarious trauma than court employees was supported, however our other hypotheses were only partially supported. We found that court employees reported more exposure to traumatic material than did college students, however there were no differences between the college students and the court employees in symptoms of secondary trauma. There were no differences in resilience factors between college students and the court employees. In addition, the college student sample reported experiencing more symptoms of stress in the past two months than did the court employees though they did not report having a higher level of stress than court employees.
These results suggest that the findings from the PPI with court employees regarding changes in worldview and trust resulted from vicarious trauma experienced at a higher level than the comparison group of college students in this study. Future researchers should consider using other comparison groups of professionals more similar in age and experience to the court employees than our college student sample.
Method
Participants
The participants were 54 students (36 women, 18 men) who were enrolled in psychology classes at a large public community college in the southwest. All of the participants volunteered to take part in the study. Most were between 18 and 29 years old (N = 46), and most selected either White (N = 28) or Latina/o (N = 14) for their race/ethnicity. Two of the students reported working in law enforcement or a closely related field.