Trauma Resilience and a Life Lived in the Shadows of Terrorism and War

This presentation will focus on the concept of trauma resilience and share our initial findings of a collaboration with 15 experts who have lived and worked in Israel all their lives. We will describe our methods of an... [ view full abstract ]

This presentation will focus on the concept of trauma resilience and share our initial findings of a collaboration with 15 experts who have lived and worked in Israel all their lives. We will describe our methods of an innovative social work research methodology –variable generating activity (VGA) - and share our findings.

We will describe the process by which the expert panel was recruited, polled, and interviewed to generate a set of truisms about trauma resilience from their perspective. First, we discuss how the members were selected and polled to determine which among the membership were best qualified to be interviewed by the research team. We then discuss the process by which the expert panelists were interviewed using professional video production team that generated over 8 hours of high quality video data for later analysis. We then describe the process by which each of the interviews were analyzed and indexed to generate a list of trauma resilience truisms.

The findings of our collaboration revealed 83 trauma truisms. Among the more salient were those associated with individual, family, and community based issues related to buffering, or protective mechanisms, which contribute to resilience from the trauma associated with living in conditions of the chronic threat from terror and war.

Toward the end of our presentation we will discuss the research implications with specific observations about the value of our approach using video data and identify the truisms observed by the panel. We will also discuss the practice implications that enhance the likelihood of resilience in the face of trauma.