2024-2025 Faculty Research Grant

Harvey Burnett (Social & Behavioral Sciences).

The Impact of Trauma on World Assumptions: Weighing the Importance of Resilience, Spiritual Well-Being, Affect, Hope, and Psychological Needs.

This project will examine the relationships between world assumptions, resilience, spiritual well-being, psychological needs, affect, and hope of three different populations affected by a traumatic event. Phase I (currently in progress) will collect data on these variables from a minimum of 112 university students who are participating in a research subjects pool. Phase II will collect data on these variables from a minimum of 300 subjects that are representative of the US population through the Prolific crowdsourcing platform. Phase III will collect data from a minimum of 300 Critical Incident Stress Management trauma responders. The following measures will be utilized for this project including a demographic questionnaire, World Assumptions Scale, Impact of Events Scale-Revised, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist, Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale, Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, Psychological Body Armor TM Questionnaire, Spiritual Index of Well-Being, Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction Scale, Positive and Negative Affect Scale, and Hope Trait Scale. The overall project will utilize a nonexperimental, time-series, survey design. A Pearson correlational analysis will examine the relationship between world assumptions, the impact of trauma events measures, PBA, general resilience, spiritual well-being, affect, and hope. A t-test will be utilized to examine differences between the two time prompts for the world assumption measure. Hierarchical regression analysis will examine which variable sets predict a change in world assumptions. A path model analysis will be utilized to discern which relational set of variables combines to act on a change in world assumptions among all three population groups.