Secondary Traumatic Stress and Resilience in Peruvian Volunteer Firefighters

Abstract

Firefighters perform laudable work for the benefit of society, they are immersed in situations that can produce and develop a series of alterations such as secondary traumatic stress, which can deteriorate their physical, mental, and emotional health, which is why they need to have the necessary tools to cope with all these tense events that occur constantly. It is also necessary that these people develop resilience, the ability to overcome critical situations and cope without this in their normal lives.

On the other hand, the purpose of this article is to determine how secondary traumatic stress is related to the resilience of volunteer firefighters in the city of Tacna in Peru. It is based on a quantitative approach, of a cross-sectional substantive type, correlational level, non-experimental design, descriptive correlational; being its population 133 firefighters and its sample 99, which were selected through a probabilistic sampling, to whom two scales were applied, one to evaluate secondary traumatic stress and the other to evaluate resilience. Regarding the descriptive statistics of the variable secondary traumatic stress, it was found that 16,2% had a very high level, 48,5% high, 29,3% regular, 5,1% low, and 1,0% very low; for resilience, 43,4% were in the very high level, 8,1% regular, 3,0% low. Finally, it is concluded that traumatic stress is significantly related to resilience having obtained a p-value = 0.000, as for Spearman's Rho correlation value this was -0,766 being strongly negative.