Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Mar 6, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 6, 2018 - Mar 24, 2018
Date Accepted: Sep 20, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Predicting Change in Posttraumatic Distress Through Change in Coping Self-Efficacy After Using the My Trauma Recovery eHealth Intervention: Laboratory Investigation
Background:
Technology offers a unique platform for delivering trauma interventions (ie, eHealth) to support trauma-exposed populations. It is important to evaluate mechanisms of therapeutic change in reducing posttraumatic distress in eHealth for trauma survivors.
Objective:
This study evaluated a proactive, scalable, and individually responsive eHealth intervention for trauma survivors called My Trauma Recovery. My Trauma Recovery is an eHealth intervention aiming to support trauma survivors and consisting of 6 modules: relaxation, triggers, self-talk, professional help, unhelpful coping, and social support. It was designed to enhance trauma coping self-efficacy (CSE). We tested 3 hypotheses. First, My Trauma Recovery would decrease posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Second, My Trauma Recovery would increase CSE. And last, changes in CSE would be negatively correlated with changes in PTSS.
Methods:
A total of 92 individuals exposed to trauma (78/92, 85% females, mean age 34.80 years) participated. Our study was part of a larger investigation and consisted of 3 sessions 1 week apart. Participants completed the baseline online survey assessing PTSS and CSE. Each session included completing assigned modules followed by the online survey assessing CSE. PTSS was remeasured at the end of the last module.
Results:
PTSS significantly declined from T1 to T9 (F1,90=23.63, P<.001, η2p=.21) supporting the clinical utility of My Trauma Recovery. Significant increases in CSE for sessions 1 and 2 (F8,83=7.51, P<.001) were found. No significant change in CSE was found during session 3 (N=92). The residualized scores between PTSS T1 and T9 and between CSE T1 and T9 were calculated. The PTSS residualized score and the CSE residualized score were significantly correlated, r=–.26, P=.01. Results for each analysis with a probable PTSD subsample were consistent.
Conclusions:
The findings of our study show that participants working through My Trauma Recovery report clinically lower PTSS after 3 weeks. The results also demonstrate that CSE is an important self-appraisal factor that increased during sessions 1 and 2. These improvements are correlated with reductions in PTSS. Thus, changes in CSE may be an important mechanism for reductions in PTSS when working on a self-help trauma recovery website and may be an important target for eHealth interventions for trauma. These findings have important implications for trauma eHealth interventions.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.