Trauma in humanitarian operations: A replication and extension of Brooks et al. (2023)

Abstract We develop a two‐part study that first performs a methods‐only replication of Brooks, Shaheen, and Dobrzykowski's study of trauma in humanitarian operations and then extends the model to investigate secondary trauma. Using data from 442 volunteer humanitarian workers collected through a scenario‐based vignette experiment, we replicate the original experimental design with a new, substantively important population. Additionally, the methods‐only replication reconsiders the relationship between trauma exposure and volunteer behaviors. Yet, the replication results reaffirm several key relationships observed among professional relief workers, including the negative effects of trauma exposure on cooperative disposition and internal integration and the moderating role of supervisor support. However, we find that trauma significantly reduces organizational commitment among volunteers; a relationship not observed in the original professional sample, highlighting important contextual differences in how trauma affects workers with less formal organizational attachment. In the second part of the study, we extend the model by introducing secondary trauma, a critical factor for a new volunteer sample. Our results show that secondary trauma operates differently from primary trauma and provides additional explanatory power in understanding behavioral responses in volunteer humanitarian settings. Together, these findings strengthen the robustness of prior theory while expanding it to account for volunteer contexts and indirect trauma exposure. The study contributes to replication research in operations and humanitarian management by demonstrating how trauma mechanisms generalize and where they diverge across organizational roles, offering implications for the management and support of volunteer workforces in disaster response.