Exploring the Dimensionality of Trauma-Informed Climate in Organizations

Background and Purpose: For several years, social work researchers and practitioners have sought to create trauma-informed organizations and settings to better serve clients who have experienced traumatic events (e.g., community or interpersonal violence). A trauma-informed organization makes policy and practice changes to improve staff and client safety and well-being. Several extant measures explore trauma-informed environments, but most assess changed attitudes and activities rather than improvements to organizational climate, the shared psychological impact of an organization. Due to the strength and pace of the trauma-informed movement, a new instrument was needed to assess outcomes of trauma-informed initiatives in organizations.

Methods: This article presents a pilot study of a trauma-informed climate instrument deployed across a network of nonprofit organizations in California. Researchers performed a review of the literature and synthesized published models for trauma-informed climate, resulting in a three-part questionnaire for which survey questions were developed. They then consulted with trauma and survey design experts to assess the instrument’s face validity. The instrument explores constituent perceptions of organizational safety; strengths-based, equitable focus; and relationship quality. A measure of the organization’s commitment to trauma awareness and response was also developed (i.e., a trauma-informed culture scale). Item responses were on a 5-point Likert scale where 1 = Not at all and 5 = Completely true. Participants (N=454) were recruited from a network of California volunteer organizations to complete an anonymous online survey. Respondents included 232 volunteers, 167 staff members, and 55 board members across 36 organizations. We performed reliability testing using Cronbach's alpha followed by assessing validity of survey concepts related to trauma-informed climate using exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

Results: The Cronbach’s alpha for each scale was good or excellent: safety (α = .85); strengths-based, equitable focus (α = .95); relationship quality (α = .95); and trauma-informed culture (α = .91). Preliminary, unconstrained EFA found one factor accounted for >50% of variability. All items loaded highly on this factor, suggesting subscales relate to each other and reflect multiple dimensions of trauma-informed climate. The EFA also identified additional factors with Eigenvalues >1. Parallel analysis suggested a 3-factor structure: Concept 1 (Leadership, equity, and inclusion); Concept 2 (Personal trust and belonging); and Concept 3 (Safety and anti-discrimination). Total variance for these three factors was 66.1%.

Conclusions and Implications: This study provided initial evidence that the new instrument measures trauma-informed climate with strong internal reliability and construct validity. Given the popularity of trauma-informed approaches in human services organizations and dearth of outcome-related studies to date, it is important for organizations to have tools that measure not only the presence of trauma-informed behaviors and attitudes, but also the organizational impact of such activities. Given our findings, this tool may be of use to human services and social welfare organizations in its current form. Researchers will continue validity testing to determine if the instrument is as streamlined and impactful as possible.