Trauma Coping of Mothers and Children Among Poor People in Haiti: Mixed Methods Study of Community-Level Research

A qualitative interview is sensitive to social complexities and personal subjectivities, whereas quantitative assessment relies on preexisting frameworks to place responses in hierarchical frequencies and counts individual experiences as an additive aggregate. Using both enquiries, a mixed methods sequential exploratory design studied mothers' focus groups and their children's trauma assessment in 3 poor communities in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The authors partnered with a free primary care clinic where they serve as U.S. behavioral health psychologists. The study enquired how Haitian children are socialized by their mothers'/caregivers' religious and nonreligious coping in the context of continuous trauma. Focus group questions for mothers (n = 27), the House-Tree-Person (HTP) drawing test for their children (n = 42), and their directions were translated, back-translated, and administered in Haitian Creole by trained Haitian staff members. Religious, African humanism, and shame stigma themes emerged from the focus groups. Correlations and multiple regressions examined relationships of the frequencies of the mothers' coping themes and with their children's scores on 2 factorial dimensions, Resilience-Vulnerability Integrated and Person Feeling Unloved. These conceptual factors were derived from culturally adapted ratings of children's HTP drawings in previous studies in the same communities (Roysircar, Colvin, Afolayan, Thompson, & Robertson, 2017; Roysircar, Geisinger, & Thompson, 2019). Significant negative relationships of religious and African humanism coping with shame stigma coping and their respective significant negative and positive relationships with children's trauma adjustment scores are integrated in a mixed methods design, related to the African diaspora literature, and approached with transnational feminist theory. Public Significance Statement On the basis of the present transnational study in a primary care setting in Haiti, it is understood that mothers' religiousness and African cultural values can help to alleviate their children's despair and provide hope in traumatic circumstances of poverty compounded by disasters. Children of mothers who spoke more about the ways that religion and cultural values helped their children during adversity expressed less vulnerability than children of mothers who spoke less about the benefits of religion and cultural values. The findings were nuanced with children's expression of ineffectiveness.