Sexual-assault crisis line volunteers, a study of stress and coping processes

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the four core hypotheses of the three theories explaining the marked variability in distress experienced by helpers who assist individuals who have been traumatized. The vulnerability hypothesis states that helpers who have experienced a trauma of their own will become more distress when providing assistance to others, as compared with their peers. The prior trauma hypothesis predicts that those helpers who have been previously traumatized will demonstrate additional baseline elevations in their levels of distress. The exposure hypothesis indicates that helpers will become increasingly distressed, as they are exposed to greater degrees of traumatic materials. The coping hypothesis states that coping efforts moderate the relationship between distress and the degree of exposure. Notably, this investigation considered these highly interdependent questions simultaneously. Fifty-six female sexual assault crisis-line volunteers were studied cross-sectionally, and 29 of these participants were followed longitudinally to test the core hypotheses. Both the cross-sectional and the longitudinal results indicated that the relationship between a helper's distress and her level of exposure to traumatic material is often qualified by her personal history of trauma and her coping efforts. As such, the findings provided conditional support for the core hypotheses. In addition, given the predicted moderating effects of a helper's coping efforts, a new narrative-based tool to assess the outcome of situation-specific coping strategies was developed and evaluated. The implications for future research, as well as for preventative interventions promoting psychological adjustment, are discussed.