Participants Say: Transformational Resilience Workshops Provide Valuable Skills

Surveys given to participants in five Transformational Resilience (TR) Program workshops in 2014 show an extremely positive response from participants especially in terms of how much they learned and the usefulness of this information from the workshop. TRIG’s Research Director, Dr. Jean Stockard, analyzed surveys taken by attendees at the beginning and end of the five TR Leaders Self-Care Workshops (now called Building Your Personal ResilienceTM); note that a total of 108 people filled out the pre-workshop survey and 87 the post-workshop survey with 80 completing both.

Ninety-seven percent of all of the attendees who completed the post-workshop survey (n=87) either agreed or strongly agreed that what they learned from the workshops would be useful (this is from summing and averaging six questions from the post-workshop survey). Additionally, 87% of the post-workshop respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they learned and improved their skills (this is from summing and averaging eleven questions from the post-workshop survey). In her report, Dr. Stockard notes, “The vast majority of the attendees agreed or strongly agreed that the instructors were knowledgeable and skilled, the presentations and materials were clear and easy to understand, the exercises were clear and helpful, and that they got something of lasting value as a result of participating in the workshop. More important only a very small minority, from one to three people per question, disagreed with these items” (2). She also highlighted that ninety-four percent of the participants agreed or strongly agreed that they had received something of “lasting value or importance” as a result of their participation; 59 percent strongly agreed. Read about the full results here.  

An additional comparison analysis was completed after the first two Leaders Self-Care Workshops: March 2014 in Eugene, Oregon and June 2014 in Oakland, California.  In places as seemingly dissimilar as Eugene and Oakland, the Transformational Resilience Leaders Self-Care Workshop had very similar and very positive responses, which strongly suggests that the methods and skills covered in the workshops are effective in building resilience skills and are applicable to different populations facing very different traumatic stresses.