Vicarious Trauma of Adult TESOL Educators: A Brief Investigation of Screening Methods

This study explored the question: How do Adult Education and Literacy Program teachers in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages context describe their experiences with teacher vicarious trauma, and does a commonly used screening tool show similar levels of teacher vicarious trauma?. Social science research has used the Professional Quality of Life (ProQOL; Stamm, 2010), a quantitative screening tool to explain vicarious trauma and related measures, and these methods have been recently adopted in research in adult education settings (Hickey et al., 2020). This study used a mixed methods approach, with 10 Adult Education and Literacy Program teachers in Minnesota in the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages context completing the ProQOL, a demographic survey, and an interview. Quantitative analysis of the ProQOL and demographics was completed. Qualitative analysis of the interview data consisted of coding for key themes, with weighting based on frequency of coded data. Results of this study show that the ProQOL in the adult education setting does not fully capture the differences in vicarious trauma and related measures that I observe in my qualitative analysis, suggesting that this benchmark measure does not holistically explain vicarious trauma and related measures. Vicarious trauma requires a combination of subject narrative and screening measures to fully capture subject experience for a full picture of the phenomenon, mirroring clinical judgment used to diagnose in the mental health field. I suggest researchers do not implement the ProQOL screening tool alone to attempt to capture vicarious trauma among adult educators, but also employ the use of interviews to capture the full phenomenon. Limitations, implications, and recommendations for future research are discussed.