The relationship between Sense of Coherence and indicators of secondary traumatic stress in non-professional trauma counsellors

Personality disposition is consistently noted in the literature as a critical component in the dynamics of stress -strain relationships. However, the precise nature of the role played by personality dispositions is still open to debate. In this study personality disposition is operationalised as a form of global perceptual disposition, namely, Antonovsky's Sense of Coherence. The role of Sense of Coherence in the potential experience of secondary traumatic stress forms the focus of this study. Data were collected on a sample of 130 trained non-professional trauma counsellors in the South African banking sector. Sense of Coherence was found not to be a consistent moderator of the relationship between the work-related experiences of the trauma counsellors and the indicators of secondary traumatic stress. Instead Sense of Coherence emerged as having a statistically strong main effect on the indicators of secondary traumatic stress.