Identity at Risk: Students’ Identity Configuration in the Aftermath of Trauma

I’m not as bright as I used to be – pupils’ meaning-making of reduced academic performance after trauma

“…The Utøya massacre became a national trauma with enormous mass-media coverage. A study of identity-work among survivors, with the same respondents as the present study, has shown how these young people systematically seek to avoid the stigma of becoming a "victim" (Skarstein & Schultz, 2017). They deny or resist the changes in their social identity and student identity (from high academic performance to low) by disassociating themselves from Utøya and trying to seem as "normal" as possible.…”

“…They appear restricted in their ability to negotiate their identity. In trying to take charge of their own identity work, they focus on controlling the attention drawn to their Utøya identities, thereby denying or hiding aspects of their traumatic experiences and symptoms of traumatic stress (Skarstein & Schultz, 2017). Ignoring or downplaying the traumatic event as the cause of change can help to avoid stigmatization -you are in charge of your own identity-work, attributing the change to dispositional factors that you can control yourself.…”

Cross-Lagged Association Between Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Perceived Centrality of a Terrorist Attack

“…To analyze the relationship between event centrality and PTSD symptoms, we fitted a latent variable cross-lagged panel model, implemented as a structural equation model (SEM) in the software package Mplus (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2017. A central feature of the crosslagged model is that the initial levels of the dependent variables are controlled for, which allows us to predict changes in the dependent constructs over and above previous levels (Selig & Little, 2012).…”

“…Descriptive analyses were performed using IBM SPSS statistics for Windows, version 20.0. For all modeling analyses we used Mplus Version 8 (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2017.…”

“…Due to missing data on the covariates, the final sample used in the Mplus analyses consisted of 310 survivors. To handle missing data we used the default routines for the WLSMV estimator in Mplus, which are based on pairwise present analysis (Muthén & Muthén, 1998-2017.…”