Exploring Trauma Literacy Quotient Among Indian Journalists and a Way Forward in Post-Pandemic Era: A Case Study of India

Abstract

The American Psychological Association defines trauma as “an emotional response to a terrible event. . . .” Trauma can be experienced as a response to either physical or emotionally disturbing circumstances. The Journalism and the Pandemic Project from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, in their global survey of journalists, have studied the impact of the pandemic on journalists across the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused varying degrees of disruptions in the personal and professional lives of journalists. Traumatic experiences like covering traumatic events up close, COVID-induced health issues, job loss, pay cuts, and insecurity at the workplace have consumed journalists like never before. Overwhelming emotions like shock, helplessness, loneliness, depression, and anxiety are some of the reactions observed by mental health experts. Indian journalists, too, like their counterparts across the globe, have had to take on the challenges posed by this unprecedented crisis. This article intends to study the impact of the pandemic on Indian journalists both from physical and emotional perspectives. The objectives of the study include—(a) to analyze the journalists’ response to traumatic experiences during the pandemic, (b) to study the nature of trauma experienced by journalists during the pandemic, (c) to analyze how traumatic experiences affected the journalists, and (d) to explore and analyze how journalists managed to cope with the traumatic experiences. The study adopts social cognitive theory (SCT) as the framework. SCT comprises four goal realization processes: self-observation, self-evaluation, self-reaction, and self-efficacy. The four components are interrelated, and all influence motivation and goal attainment. Social cognition includes diverse processes linking the perception of social information with a behavioral response, including perception, attention, decision-making, memory, and emotion. The post-traumatic reactions include re-experiencing the traumatic event in flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, and intrusive memories, hypervigilant arousal, impaired concentration, depression, sleep disturbances, self-devaluation, avoidance of reminders of traumatic experiences, emotional detachment from others, and disengagement from aspects of life that provide meaning and self-fulfillment, which impair intrapersonal, interpersonal, and occupational functioning. The scope of the study covers the journalists’ responses to traumatic experiences specific to the pandemic. The study adopts a mixed research method with a thematic analysis of the qualitative data from interviews of journalists followed by a factor analysis of the quantitative data from the survey of the journalists.