Posttraumatic growth, empowerment, and volunteering : cultural and religious perspectives

While posttraumatic growth (PTG) has been demonstrated across a variety of cross-cultural contexts, the fact that expression and understanding of this construct can be affected by cultural, religious, and organisational characteristics makes it important to assess the validity of this construct for specific groups (Weiss & Berger, 2010). This study aimed to address this issue by first conducting focus group interviews to examine how Taiwanese Buddhist disaster recovery volunteers (N =25) interpreted their work experience and associated outcomes when working in disaster contexts. Finding that their accounts supported face validity for the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996) and the Psychological Empowerment Instrument (Spreitzer, 1995) underpinned the conduction of exploratory factor analysis for PTG and empowerment. The EFA was based on data from 254 Taiwanese, Buddhist volunteers. A two-factor model for empowerment was found. A factor structure for the PTGI could not be established. As a result, consistent with the work of Weiss and Burger (2010) it was suggested that while these constructs may be applicable to this context the PTGI may be an inappropriate measure of PTG for this population.