Summary

Working with abused children can have positive and negative implications for social workers. Some of these implications have been conceptualized as secondary traumatic stress and vicarious post-traumatic growth. The current study examined the question of whether these two phenomena share similar contributing factors. Based on the social-ecological theory and previous studies on secondary traumatic stress, we examined the contribution of personal factors and level of exposure to trauma (i.e. years of work experience, professional exposure to child abuse, mastery) and environmental factors (i.e. social support, supervision, and role stress) to the explained variance of secondary traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth, with the goal of understanding these two potential outcomes. This cross-sectional study comprised 255 social workers who worked with abused children.

Findings

The results showed that despite the correlation between the two outcomes—post-traumatic growth and secondary traumatic stress—they shared only one common predictive factor: the extent of social workers’ exposure to abused children. Role stress was correlated positively, and mastery was correlated negatively, with secondary traumatic stress only. Years of work experience was correlated positively with post-traumatic growth only.

Applications

The current study shows the importance of continuing efforts to identify the factors that contribute to post-traumatic growth. At the same time, efforts should be made to foster certain personal and environmental factors to reduce secondary traumatic stress levels.

中文翻译：

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与受虐待儿童一起工作的社会工作者中的继发性创伤压力和创伤后的替代成长

概要

与受虐待的儿童一起工作会对社会工作者产生积极和消极的影响。其中一些含义已被概念化为继发性创伤压力和替代创伤后生长。当前的研究探讨了这两种现象是否具有相似的影响因素的问题。基于社会生态学理论和先前对继发性创伤压力的研究，我们研究了个人因素的影响和接触创伤的水平（即多年工作经验，对儿童虐待的专业接触，掌握）和环境因素（即社会支持） ，监督和角色压力），以解释继发性创伤压力和创伤后生长的差异，目的是了解这两个潜在结果。

发现

结果表明，尽管创伤后生长和继发性创伤压力这两个结果之间存在相关性，但它们仅具有一个共同的预测因素：社会工作者接触受虐待儿童的程度。角色压力与继发性创伤压力呈正相关，而精通与否则呈负相关。多年的工作经验仅与创伤后的成长呈正相关。

应用领域

当前的研究表明，继续努力确定导致创伤后增长的因素的重要性。同时，应努力培养某些个人和环境因素，以减少继发性创伤压力水平。