Collegiate Times

Image: 2011-08-29 22:19:38

Russell T. Jones was once on an airplane with a rocket scientist who explained the plane was flying because several engines were working together and compensating for each other. He called that phenomenon “gimbling.”

According to Jones, a similar phenomenon helped members of the Virginia Tech community after the April 16, 2007, campus shootings claimed 32 lives. He and Michael Hughes, a Tech sociology professor, recently published a study that found 15.4 percent of Tech students showed symptoms of trauma after the tragedy — a significantly lower number than studies of other shootings have shown.

“Following the Virginia Tech shootings we were ‘gimbling,’” Jones said. “We were coming together, developing relationships to move forward in the recovery process. Help is available following any kind of traumatic experience, that’s the bottom line.”

Hughes’ and Jones’ study is the first large-scale survey of college students after a mass shooting incident on a campus.

In the study, they surveyed 4,639 students three months after the shootings occurred to assess symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“There have been studies of shooting incidents, but they’ve all been very different from this one,” Hughes said. “It was a very large social system in which this happened, where people are more tightly connected.”

The most prevalent stressors for respondents were the inability to confirm safety of friends — 64.5 percent — and the death of a close friend — 9.1 percent. Although the inability to confirm the safety of friends was the most common, the death of a close friend was found to be the more traumatizing stressor.

Women who participated in the survey were found more likely to have experienced trauma symptoms than men, which is consistent with earlier research. Findings have shown that women have broader secondary networks of friends and acquaintances than men, and are more affected by losses within those secondary
networks.

The lower percentage of participants showing symptoms is likely because previous studies could only focus on the people in the specific areas where shootings had taken place, while Jones’ and Hughes’ study surveyed a wide scope of Tech students, not only those who were in an affected building at the time.

The amount of people affected included not only the people who were physically close to the shootings, but also the majority of the Tech campus and even good chunk of the Blacksburg community.

Not everyone who is exposed to trauma will acquire symptoms of PTSD, therefore it would have taken a broad-based outreach program to discover which people were affected enough to need mental health interventions. 

Jones indicated there is a “science to recovery” for the individuals traumatized by the incident.

Social support and coping can lead to more effective recoveries, while avoidance could eventually lead to negative outcomes such as PTSD, depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or phobias, to name a
few.

A version of this article appeared in the Aug 30 issue of the Collegiate Times.