A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts. University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
(Clinical Psycholoqy).
Johannesburg, August 1996 / This study aims to explore the relationship between intrusion and avoidance symptoms
as described in the diagnostic category in the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric
Association, 1994) and frequency and level of exposure to traumatogenic events. The
effects of lay counselling after the event were taken into account in the analysis, and
the sample consisted of voluntary First National Bank employees, who were exposed to
more than one bank robbery between December 1989 and 1992.
The hypotheses of the study were that an increasing number of exposures to potentially
traumatogenic events, and increasing levels of exposure to potentially traurnatoqenic
events would be related to the development of avoidant and intrusion symptoms.
Further, it was hypothesised that the interaction of these two variables would also be
significantly related to the development of avoidant and intrusive symptoms and the
nature of this interaction was explored. The scale used to measure the symptoms was
the impact of Events Scale (Horowitz, 1979). Level of exposure was measured on a
four point scale, which included extreme exposure with physical injury; direct threat and
coafrontatlon: indirect contact with the perpetrators, and the fourth category was
indirect exposure, or secondary victimisation.
The results indicated that level of exposure had a significant relationship with the
development of both intrusion and avoidance symptoms. Contrary to expectations,
frequency of exposure was not found to be related to symptomology and it was
speculated that this might have been because of the crudeness of the measure. In this
regard it is of note that level of exposure as measured in this study included frequency
of exposure. The results indicated further that post trauma counselling was not
significantly related to symptomology.
The implications of these findings were discussed in the light of the general literature in
PTSD.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/20648 |
| Date | 18 July 2016 |
| Creators | Benatar, Sharon |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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