Understanding psychological and collective trauma related to neighborhood violence

Abstract

Trauma is a popular but poorly defined concept. As a psychological phenomenon, people use the term trauma to refer to a range of diagnosable conditions as well as to a generalized, subclinical feeling of distress. As a community-level phenomenon, collective trauma has been conceptualized in diverse manners across various contexts, such as post-war societies, communities that have experienced a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, and social groupings that have experienced persecution across multiple generations. Rarely, however, has collective trauma been theorized as an outgrowth of neighborhood violence in U.S. cities. The objective of this study is to quantify the prevalence of psychological trauma, as well as to explore the nature of collective trauma, in neighborhoods that experience chronic, pervasive community violence. Conceptualizing collective trauma at the neighborhood level involves investigating the extent to which community-level responses to neighborhood violence adhere to existing theoretical constructs for collective trauma. It also requires expanding existing theory to account for the ways in which collectivities experience and culturally process chronic social suffering. By quantifying psychological trauma and by more precisely defining collective trauma in Boston neighborhoods, this study offers insights as to how communities can recover from or process trauma, whether existing programming can adequately address psychological and collective trauma, and what policies or structures may contribute to both individual and community recovery and resilience. This study uses primary and secondary survey analysis, as well as qualitative data from focus groups and in-depth personal interviews, to understand the individual impact of living in micro-neighborhoods in Roxbury, Boston that have experienced a high level of current and/ or historical violence, and to infer patterns across individual responses that may indicate collective impact. Based on primary data collection from the Understanding and Responding to Trauma Survey (URTS), the study finds that rates of PTSD in these micro-neighborhoods exceed estimates aggregated at the zip code and city level, but that clinical mental health services may be insufficient and/ or underutilized due to knowledge, confidence, and availability gaps. Also, this study uses factor analysis to create and test indices for neighborhood narrative frames that may indicate the presence of collective trauma. Residents who have a personal or proximate experience of violence in their neighborhood understand and frame their neighborhood's history and identity in substantively different ways than individuals who have not directly experienced violence in the neighborhood; on average, they have a stronger sense of critical consciousness about external stigmatization and structural inequities between neighborhoods and have higher levels of internalized stigma toward their neighborhoods. In addition, individuals who have experienced neighborhood violence display higher levels of civic activism, on average. By testing the narrative frames indices derived from the Boston survey within the larger, multi-level PHDCN 1994-1995 Community Survey dataset, this study further finds that individuals who reside in neighborhoods with higher current levels of violent victimization also display higher levels civic activism, higher levels of critical consciousness about structural inequities between neighborhoods, and higher levels of internalized stigma, independent of their personal experience of violence. Based on corroboration with qualitative individual and group interviews, these three indices-civic activism, critical frames, and stigma frames-constitute quantifiable indices of collective trauma related to neighborhood violence. These indices, as well as PTSD, are further associated with embeddedness in neighborhood social networks, participation in neighborhood social and civic groups, and feelings of attachment to neighborhood collective identity. Qualitative data from a focus group and interviews reinforce the finding that that collective trauma is a phenomenon related to specific framings of neighborhood collective identity and adheres to a model of cultural trauma proposed by scholars of post-conflict, national contexts. Despite the limitations of using individual responses to describe a social concept via measures of central tendency, by testing and expanding theoretical conceptions of community-level trauma, this study creates indices for collective trauma that can enable comparison between neighborhoods and thus serve as a basis for further study of the collective impact of chronic, pervasive violence on marginalized communities. This research also expands conceptualizations of collective trauma and demonstrates that the theory of cultural trauma may be applied to a context of ongoing neighborhood violence. In addition, the results for this study indicate several recommendations for the development of appropriate interventions and responses to mitigate the negative effects of chronic, pervasive violence.