Study Research Study On Thinking Styles, Coping Patterns And Trauma

[Ceylan Gocmen]

Thinking styles, Coping patterns and Trauma

Have you witnessed or experienced a traumatic event?

Do you have repeated, disturbing memories, thoughts or images of a traumatic experience from the past?

If so, your participation is this study will be greatly appreciated!

Researchers at the Cairnmillar Institute are interested in investigating thinking and coping styles associated with experiencing a traumatic event. In particular, we would like to explore the thinking styles and coping strategies people use.

In this study, you will be asked questions assessing the thinking style and coping strategies you use to deal with adverse situations in general to assess whether dispositional thinking and coping style are related to actual life events and traumas. The study will shed light on the difference between the thinking and coping style of trauma exposed individuals who develop PTSD from similarly trauma-exposed individuals who do not develop symptoms.

The questionnaire will take approximately 20-30 minutes to complete. Your participation is completely voluntary and you are free to withdraw from the study at any time. You will not be required to provide any identifying information, thus ensuring anonymity and confidentiality. Participants must be aged 18-55 to participate.

Thank-you for your interest and participation.

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[rightkindofme]

Ok, the parts where you ask for dates isn't working. No date format will satisfy the box so I can move on. This is very frustrating.

 

[rightkindofme]

Eventually it let me move on. I put a series of semi random dates down until it accepted one because my traumas weren't one day deals.

 

[Deleted member 1860]

I'm guessing you don't want childhood trauma? Kids don't have any sense of thinking style formed so that could skew your results. I guess what I'm saying is that we cope in any way we can because we don't know good coping skills. A three year old doesn't really know any true coping skills besides cry and run to someone safe.

 

[Fadeaway]

Can't get past the date issue

 

[Ceylan Gocmen]

Hi guys, thanks for the feedback (and taking the time to contribute to research! :) ). Can I please get some more info on the date issue? as when I first tested the questionnaire, it accepted the date in any format. Thanks very much. @Fadeaway @rightkindofme

 

[Ceylan Gocmen]

Hi @Solara, yes you're absolutely right, we cope the best way we know how, given our internal and external resources. What I'm looking at is, how your traumatic experience has impacted your current thinking and coping style. More specifically, I'm looking at dispositional coping and thinking style.

 

[Fadeaway]

Well it seems to be fixed now.

I would like to add that I always get frustrated by questionnaires that don't allow for comments. Some questions can not be properly answered given the choices, and I always worry that the results will be thrown off because this and affect peoples understanding of PTSD. I try to pick the best option, but no matter what I choose it is inaccurate.

 

[rightkindofme]

Yeah, it was kinda funny how much panic I felt when the date was required. I tried 9/9/1983 and 9/9/83 and 9-9-1983 and September 9, 1983 and I think another and on my like fifth try it finally said ok.

 

[Friday]

I had to quit taking this one

- Dates & Timeframes ... It seems to be skewed towards a single incident that happened recently. The questionnaire becomes cumbersome if it was many events, in different categories, over a period of time... and if there was any variation or significant period of time from the trauma to present. Makes it impossible to give realistic answers. Ex) How many days has XYZ affected you? Well, some years? Maybe 0. Other years? Half. Other years? Most. With middling years as well. It's not as simple as #, half, or most. There's a wide variety of normal in 15 or 20 years post trauma.

... I did skip ahead though, to see if there was anything I could answer in a way which would be a good reflection on experience and ran into another wall:

- the section where it's asking you to place a cause on an event. Yes. It's clear it's looking for trends on certain things. But if the way on views the world is that sometimes you're at fault, sometimes no one is at fault / a thing simply is, and sometimes someone else is at fault... And there are a wide variety of reasons for any one event... And depending on the individual thing it may affect everything most of the time, some things intermittently, or rarely anything at all? ... It becomes too tedious, if you look at the world with any degree of variability. I can see how stream of consciousness, or in person, this might elicit a good trend, but since I start giving ridiculous answers when vexed (<grin> coping trend!) I'm begging off.

 

[digger]

I find that a lot of these surveys tend to assume that you can isolate your trauma to one single event.

 

[Friday]

LOL I blame the spreadsheets! My sister is a neuroscience grad student and spends thousands of hours imputing data. Anything that is variable doesn't code well (needs trees of their own). 3 dimensional (instead of 2D) graphs like a sonuvabitch.