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Published (Version of record)CC BY V4.0, Open Access
Published (Version of record)CC BY V4.0, Open
Journal article
Nurses’ meaning-making attempts during the pandemic: Relations with psychological adjustment and the moderating role of COVID-19 experience
Traumatology, Vol.First online, pp.1-11
25/08/2025
Appears in Recent Faculty of Health Publications
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Abstract
When people experience a highly stressful event, such as working as a nurse during a pandemic, they tend to engage in meaning-making attempts to recover. Meaning-making attempts can be automatic, such as having intrusive thoughts about the event, or deliberate, such as positively reframing the event. Such meaning-making attempts have differential relationships with psychological adjustment, which might be, in part, because the context of meaning-making matters. The present study examined whether, as indicators of context, nurses’ perceptions of their COVID-19 experience moderate the meaning making–psychological adjustment relationship. Australian nurses working in the acute care sector during Australia’s second wave of the pandemic (N = 1,125) completed an online survey measuring indicators of automatic and deliberate meaning making (intrusion and positive reframing, respectively), psychological adjustment (depression, anxiety, and subjective well-being), and perceptions of COVID-19 experience (protection training, support, workload pressure, and interpersonal avoidance). Moderation analyses found that: (a) there were relationships between intrusion and poorer psychological adjustment that were weakened by protection training and support; (b) positive reframing related to less depression and greater subjective well-being at low levels of protection training, but was unrelated to these outcomes at high levels of protection training; and (c) positive reframing related to less depression at high levels of workload pressure, but was unrelated to depression at low levels of workload pressure. While cross-sectional, findings indicate that COVID-19 experience variables moderate the meaning making–psychological adjustment relationship in nurses. Future research should consider topic-specific context variables when examining meaning making and psychological adjustment.
Details
- Title
- Nurses’ meaning-making attempts during the pandemic: Relations with psychological adjustment and the moderating role of COVID-19 experience
- Creators
- Christina Samios - Southern Cross UniversityChristina Aggar - Southern Cross UniversityNicola Whiteing - Southern Cross UniversityDebbie Massey - Southern Cross UniversityRae Rafferty - Southern Cross UniversityKaren Bowen - Northern NSW Local Health DistrictAlexandre Stephens - Northern NSW Local Health District
- Publication Details
- Traumatology, Vol.First online, pp.1-11
- Publisher
- American Psychological Association; WASHINGTON
- Grant note
- Open Access funding provided by Southern Cross University.
- Identifiers
- 991013309820902368
- Copyright
- © 2025 The Author(s) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format, as well as adapting the material for any purpose, even commercially.
- Academic Unit
- Human Sciences; Nursing; Faculty of Health
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Journal article