Exploring Resilience and Meaningful Work in Rape Crisis Advocacy

Abstract

Rape crisis advocates (RCAs) are high-stakes volunteers (HSVs) that provide advocacy services to survivors of sexual violence during forensic examinations. Given that supporting survivors can be emotionally difficult, practicing resilience is foundational to their volunteerism. Drawing on 23 interviews with RCAs, results demonstrate that RCAs communicatively construct resilience through practicing Buzzanell’s (2010) five communication processes of resilience. This interpretive analysis contributes theoretically and practically to feminist organizational communication research by illuminating how work meaningfulness is embedded within resilience in RCA volunteerism. In offering how RCAs distinctly practice each resilience communicative process, we reveal sources and mechanisms through which RCAs construct work meaningfulness. Thus, our results problematize previous resilience research by demonstrating its critical connection to meaningful work, yet lack of scholarly attention to it. We also offer theoretical implications for HSVs through suggesting that the motives attracting volunteers to high-stakes volunteerism help them communicatively enact resilience when they endure hardships at work.