The Impact of Secondary Traumatic Stress on Professional Members: A Collected Study

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of researches that study secondary traumatic stress experienced by professional members of society (e.g. search and rescue teams, emergency response teams, psychologists, sociologists and social services experts etc.…) who work with people that are subject to destructive circumstance in life, and study their relationship with different variables. For this research, 15 studies conducted between the years 2007 and 20017 in Turkey are examined and compared in terms of samples, methods, findings and discussions. It has been observed that secondary traumatic stress varies in accordance with sex, years of experience and type of occupations, and it is closely related to personal factors such as coping skills and exhaustion. Secondary traumatic stress has been discovered to increase with experience and decrease as education level increases; and it is experienced less by psychologists and more by people with personal trauma history when compared to other members of occupation. The findings related to gender variation are contradictive. Controversial findings of the researches are evaluated and interpreted by taking into account the solutions recommended to prevent and respond to secondary traumatic stress