Improving the career resilience of a survivor of sexual abuse

ABSTRACT

This study examined whether life design counselling can enhance the career resilience of a sexual abuse survivor. One participant was selected through purposive sampling. Five life design sessions occurred over a period of three months. Various (postmodern) qualitative and quantitative techniques were used to gather data while data analysis was done using thematic content analysis. Following the intervention, findings from a qualitative perspective indicate that the narrative career counselling intervention was successful. We conclude that various narrative techniques can be used to enhance a childhood sexual abuse survivor’s career resilience. Future research should assess the value of life design counselling in group-based contexts to help survivors of sexual abuse (re-)construct career-life narratives for their future selves and careers.

KEYWORDS:

• Career resilience
• career counselling
• sexual abuse
• survivor
• life design
• mixed-methods design

Acknowledgement

We thank the participant for taking part in the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kobus Maree is an educational psychologist and a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Pretoria. He holds doctoral degrees in Education (Career counseling), Mathematics Education, and Psychology. A regular keynote speaker at national and international conferences, he has received multiple awards for his work and he has a B1 rating from the National Research Foundation. Prof. Maree has authored or co­-authored 90 peer­-reviewed articles and 61 books/ book chapters on career counselling and related topics since 2008. In the same period, he supervised 30 doctoral theses and Masters dissertations and read keynote papers at 20+ international and at 20+ national conferences.

Cobus Venter (MEd (Education Psychology)) is an educational psychologist with a passion for children. He specializes in helping survivors of abuse deal with trauma by enabling them to narrate better, healthier stories. Cobus has over eight years experience of working with children that are trying to deal with the lingering after-effects of traumatic life events. He has a particular interest in enhancing peoples career resilience and (career) adaptability.

Notes

1 Contradictory to the first two scales of the RSCA, a high score on the overall emotional reactivity scale indicates vulnerability, while a low score is indicative of resilience within an individual.

2 The three-digit coding system that was used to reference data works as follows. The first number refers to the data collection technique that has been used. The second number refers to the page number and the third number refers to the line number. This was done in an attempt to ensure more effective referencing in relation to the transcripts that were created throughout the research.