Victim Services Providers and Vicarious Resilience

Project Description:

This project builds off from prior Algonquin College research in the area of resilience in victims of violence. The project will focus on the area of victim service providers. The purpose of the research is to review best practices, locate systemic barriers that service providers encounter when serving clients, develop tools that will help foster resilience for service providers, and to collaborate with service providers to identify what additional training will be helpful.
The methodology involves consultation with supporting victim service organizations to assess research needs and how we can make the project as useful as possible. Consultation will entail collaboration to build an online mixed-methods questionnaire, as well as focus groups and interview protocols.
Next, our collaborators from different sectors will distribute the online questionnaire to approximately 300-500 victim service providers from across Canada. We will also form 5-7 focus groups to generate group discussion about our research themes and to facilitate information sharing about innovative approaches in victims services. We will conduct in-depth interviews with victim service providers to find what is most effective for supporting victims of crime, systemic barriers that victims encounter, and to discuss service provider wellness.
The importance of this project is that it will allow examination of a broad range of services across multiple jurisdictions as prior research has primarily focused on one specific victimization type (e.g., domestic violence shelters). This project will also provide a needed update to our national data on victim service data in Canada as the last national survey on victim services in Canada happened in 2011/2012. We hope to co-construct a new understanding of vicarious resilience for service providers. We also have rare access to a large number of service providers across the country. Despite the rapid expansion of services for victims of crime, there has been limited research on the victim service sector in Canada and how service providers balance helping victims of crime navigate the complexities of violence while caring for their personal well-being.
We are actively working on creating and editing the questionnaire in SurveyMonkey and the next steps are to consult with our supporting organizations. The process of learning how to input questions onto SurveyMonkey was a slight learning curve, but we were able to navigate this process with relatively few difficulties. We received feedback from our lab director, Dr. Benjamin Roebuck, and incorporated any necessary changes. We have also been engaged in researching the relevant literature on service provider needs, vicarious resilience, and related concepts of vicarious resilience that are applicable to the study. We are also currently navigating the literature on current toolkits for compassion fatigue, burnout, vicarious resilience, and vicarious trauma for common themes and what was incorporated into creating these toolkits. This will help to create a foundation for the development of the toolkit for vicarious resilience that will ultimately be created from this project. We have collaborated together as a team by delegating tasks and communicating with each other about any struggles we have encountered during the process.

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