Key Resources

Taking a Trauma Informed Approach

Different perspectives help expand our understanding of the world around us. In this section, you’ll learn helpful techniques and key considerations for engaging with community members and diverse audiences. As engagement experts, we should never assume what someone’s past experiences have been, that’s why it’s so important to use a trauma informed approach. 

These resources offer helpful approaches and key considerations for engagement with a trauma-informed approach and with diverse audiences using a diversity, equity and inclusion lens.

We will cover the following topics:

  • Definition of trauma and being trauma-informed

  • Diversity, equity and inclusion

  • Generational effects of trauma

  • Biases in research design

  • Additional resources

+ Trauma-Informed Care

What is trauma?

  • “Individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)

What does it mean to be trauma-informed? Again, from SAMHSA:

  • “A program, organization, or system or person that is trauma-informed realizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential paths for recovery; recognizes the signs and symptoms of trauma in clients, families, staff, and others involved with the system; and responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices, and seeks to actively resist re-traumatization.”

When we build our capacity to be trauma-informed, it changes how we approach working with people. A trauma-informed approach looks like these six principles from SAMHSA:

  • Safety
  • Trustworthiness & Transparency
  • Collaboration & Mutuality
  • Empowerment, Voice & Choice
  • Peer Support
  • Understanding Cultural, Historical and Gender Issues

+ Generational Effects of Trauma

Throughout history and during our present time, people have been/are subjected to long-term, mass traumas like colonialism, slavery, war, and genocide. People exposed to these traumas exhibit a higher prevalence of disease even several generations after the original trauma occurred.

  • Exposure to mass trauma often results in maladaptive behaviors and related social problems. Substance abuse, physical/sexual abuse, and suicide directly traumatize younger generations and can become learned behavior, perpetuating intergenerational cycles of trauma.
  • Traumatic events become embedded in the social memories of the population and younger generations become exposed to unresolved grief, persecution and distrust through the loss of culture and language, discrimination, injustice, poverty, and social inequality.
  • The cumulative effects of historical trauma on the population can produce health disparities resulting from the accumulation of diseases and social distress across generations.

+ Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Diversity is the representation of all our varied identities and differences—collectively and as individuals.

Equity seeks to ensure fair treatment, equality of opportunity, and parity in access to information and resources for all.

Inclusion builds a culture of belonging by actively inviting the contribution and participation of all people.

  • As you engage individuals, families and communities in their health and well-being, it is critical to obtain feedback from the diversity of people and families you are serving. There is diversity across personal characteristics (i.e. race, age, gender, sexual orientation, origin, income, etc.) as well as diversity of thought.
  • Knowing that particular groups have often been excluded from decision-making and equitable distribution of resources; inclusion requires attention and effort to make sure all voices are heard.
  • We must also recognize any assumptions and bias we carry into our work and interactions, and be deliberate about the power our thoughts, words and actions have to either empower or marginalize others.

Bias is the negative evaluation of one group and its members relative to another; and/or prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another.

  • Explicit bias occurs when a person is aware of his/her evaluation of a group, believes that evaluation to be correct, and has the time and motivation to act on it.
  • Implicit bias is unintentional or unconscious

+ Biases in research design

Biases is an inclination to take shortcuts in our thinking which can result in mistakes. As humans, we have weaknesses in how we reason. We are not inherently logical. There are certain problems that come from being a human including biases. The following are 5 preventable problems to reduce bias in research design and what to do about it.

Selection bias

Happens when you only ask questions to a certain group of people, creating a biased sample.

  • Vary where, when and how you recruit people
  • Check your participant pool partway through. Lopsided? Change tactics
  • Set quotas, e.g., “Let’s talk to a hundred people, roughly half women

Priming

A phenomenon where recent experiences influence our decisions. We don’t want to set people up for an answer.

  • Don’t offer any context they don’t need to answer the question
  • Be smart about question order from general to specific and from least to most influential

Stereotype threat

A phenomenon where people’s answers will be affected by any reminders of their membership in a stereotyped group.

  • Unless you need to screen/select people based on demographics, collect that information at the end.
  • Don’t collect demographic data at all if you don’t need it

Confirmation bias

Happens when we tend to notice, look for, and over-emphasize confirmatory evidence.

  • Design surveys and questions to check for evidence and counter-evidence.
  • Check for alternative explanations.
  • Give them a chance to say what they need to say, including the things you don’t expect

Survivorship bias

The tendency to look at the successes and miss important information about the failures.

  • Sample partway through the process: beginning, middle and end.
  • Observe behaviour of the people you lose: when did they quit? What did they do on the way out?
  • Design exit interview questions to give people a diplomatic way to give you tough answers.

+ Resources

Trauma-informed care resources

  • Daminger, A., Hayes, J., Barrows, A., & Wright, J. (2015). “Poverty Interrupted: Applying Behavioral Science to the Context of Chronic Scarcity.” Ideas42. Link to White Paper: https://tinyurl.com/ybt3ghos
  • Felitti, V., et al. (1998). “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study.” American Journal of Preventive Medicine. 14(4): 245-258. https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(98)00017-8/abstract
  • SAMHSA. (2014). “SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach.” Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. https://ncsacw.samhsa.gov/userfiles/files/SAMHSA_Trauma.pdf
  • Torchalla, I., et al. (2015). “Like a lots happened with my whole childhood: Violence, trauma, and addiction in pregnant and postpartum women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.” Harm Reduction Journal. 11(1). https://tinyurl.com/y8qde7cg

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Resources