Out of the Mouths of Babes: Using Dimensional Analysis to Understand How Black Teens Construct Meaning of Trauma and Healing

Background and Purpose: Literature commonly privileges the voices of adults in discussions on trauma and African American adolescent mental health. Western frameworks for explaining trauma and mental health resilience typically dominate this dialogue. However, emerging scholars have demonstrated that youth at advanced stages of cognitive development can offer mature insights on wellness concepts and personalized ideas about illness and healing that can be significantly different from adults and from Western conceptualizations and models. While some researchers have begun to investigate youths’ general perspectives on mental health and service utilization, there is limited research that specifically examines African American teens’ perspectives on trauma and on healing. This study sought to elevate the voices of Black youth in dialogue around trauma and recovery and to explore how their views on these concepts offer insights into their trauma response behaviors.

Methods: Dimensional analysis is a qualitative research approach that expands on the process of analysis associated with grounded theory. This research strategy offers analytic tools that enable the researcher to examine how individuals construct meaning of phenomenon and how they use these meanings to facilitate their cognitions and actions. In the current study, dimensional analysis was used to develop an explanatory model of how African American adolescents construct the phenomena of trauma and healing. Semi-structured interviewing and a visual arts exercise were used to engage a purposive sample of 12, low-income, African American teens about their thoughts on these topics. Nvivo10 qualitative analysis software was employed to analyze participant responses to interview questions and the drawing activity.

Results: Participants’ perspectives on trauma were largely framed by their exposure to hardships and stressors within their family, peer, and neighborhood contexts. Their conceptualizations of trauma included discussion of death and loss, police harassment, violence, bullying, parental unavailability, and feeling trapped in communities plagued by chronic risks and adversity. Participants also constructed trauma as the result of complex structural challenges, including poverty, racism, discrimination, and oppression. Participants defined healing using language including regrouping, recovering, persevering and enduring, and presented varying beliefs about the possibility and process of healing from trauma. Their discussions of healing reflected many culturally and developmentally informed approaches, including independent coping strategies, and reliance on cognitive strengths, faith beliefs, music therapy, and kinship supports to address trauma-related psychological distress.

Conclusions & Implications: Dimensional analysis supported the development of a cognitive model of how African American adolescents respond to traumatic stress. Findings highlight the importance of personal, social, and contextual factors and experiences in shaping African American adolescents’ perspectives on trauma and healing. Results offer important insights into areas for training, intervention, and for the development of culturally relevant models for trauma informed care. Research findings also have important implications for current dialogue on help-seeking and mental health service use among low-income, African American teens who are impacted by traumatic events.