our science, our scientists, and our approach to trauma recovery
Interviewing strategies
Our research emphasis is to create structures that allow survivors to “tell their story.” The story they tell, however, must be fully under their control. Therefore, our interviewing methods are designed to provide a structure to look at themselves, their contexts, and their their thoughts, feelings and actions. These interview methods allow the participant to explore and analyze how they derive meaning, and how that meaning has guided their actions up until now. This kind of interview, then, equips them to decide how they want to move forward in their recovery and healing.
Clinical Ethnographic Narrative Interview (CENI)
The CENI uses trauma-informed anthropological and narrative techniques to create a structured container that helps survivors (and truly anyone who is healing) explore the social and cultural aspects of suffering, meaning, help seeking and healing.
Photo-experiencing and Reflective Listening (PEARL)
PEARL is a process by which individuals can explore their reactions to the world around them and then reflect on these experiences with a trained, compassionate witness. It uses the benefits of experience sampling, photo-elicitation, and narrative to allow an individual to look at their environment in a new way and notice the people, situations, and environments that influence their thoughts and feelings about a particular topic.
Survey instruments
We believe that listening to survivors closely will reveal those experiences and concepts that are important to them. We are working to translate existing instruments, and then use cognitive interviewing, international instrument validation techniques and mixed methods to make sure survivor’s voices are represented in survey instruments that can be used for theory testing in larger samples.
Mixed Method strategies
This research requires innovations in methods to capture complex phenomenon. We are developing mixed method strategies to capture recovery experiences, including rubrics that we can use to quantify qualitative data, and research designs that allow for integrating qualitative and quantitative data.
Publications
Please visit our publications center to access some of the publications arising from our work.
Projects
Please visit our projects center to learn more about our projects and preliminary findings.