Navigating trauma : analysing the lived experiences of journalists who suffered violence in the line of duty

Abstract

Through the lens of the Coping Circumplex Model (CCM) and the phenomenological research approach, this study explores how Ghanaian journalists deal with trauma experienced in the line of duty. Participants reported experiencing a variety of traumas, including psychological, emotional, and physical. The data also revealed that the coping techniques adopted by participants fell within both the problem-coping and the emotion-coping dimensions. Some employed avoidance as an emotion-coping strategy and got triggered when they saw culprits, pointing to emotion-coping’s ineffectiveness in healing trauma. The trauma journalists experience also sometimes extends to the victims’ relations, calling for an exploration of coping strategies for victims of the cascading effects of trauma experienced by others in future studies.