Coping with trauma and navigating the recovery process looks different for everyone, but different how? Little is known about the immediate recovery from a traumatic physical injury and the predictors of how much an individual will struggle during it.
By surveying and collecting data from 300 individuals who have experienced a serious physical injury, Charles Benight, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience and Co-PI Bernard Ricca, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Rochester, are learning more about how people cope after trauma and the patterns present in their recovery in their project “Injury Recovery Improvement Study,” funded by a National Science Foundation grant.
“The focus of the grant really is to understand how people cope with a major traumatic injury,” said Benight. “Three weeks after they discharge from the hospital, we have them come in and do an initial survey that takes about twenty minutes and covers all kinds of demographics on who they are – their socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, education. We also look at their coping processes at that moment: the distress that they’re experiencing, post-traumatic stress symptoms, depression, anxiety and other coping behaviors.”
Following that survey, participants wear a bio watch for six weeks that tracks their heart rate, sleep patterns and heart rate variability (the variation of time between heartbeats). During this six-week period, they also take brief surveys twice a day that asks about their immediate coping, their perceptions of their recovery, how positive or negative of emotions they’re feeling and similar assessments, along with a short audio clip of themselves to submit on how they’re feeling. Once the six weeks are up, they take further surveys at specific interval points, such as three months out, to continue assessing coping and recovery patterns.
“We’re able to get from this a lot of detailed information about their coping process, and then we can develop interventions for that,” explained Benight. “It’s new work and not many people are doing this work, so it’s a challenge, but we’re excited about learning more and hopefully developing earlier interventions from the data.”
Along with earlier interventions for physical injury trauma, other societal benefits from this project can help inform healthcare policy, trauma support and disaster response and understanding how survivors recover from other major traumas including sexual assault, war and disasters.
Learn more about Benight’s work and the Lyda Hill Institute of Human Resilience online.