Introduction

In this presentation we shall examine some of the effects of the violence unleashed by the institutional crisis during the years 2001-2002, as they are described by some of those who underwent it. And also what they say about the way they sought to mitigate them. In short: the damage and its palliatives, as described by the victims-protagonists. We shall not speak here of the causes of that violence, nor of the professional methods that make it possible to resolve it or to relieve its effects.

In recent years, and most particularly from December 2001 onwards, there occurred in the country a series of events unprecedented in our history, which had a wide echo not only among our population but also in the world press.

Among these striking events, which acted as social stressors, let us mention: the continuous rise in unemployment and poverty, what has been called the financial “corralito”, the fall of a constitutional president and the succession of several presidents within the space of five days, the physical destruction of banks, the cacerolazos and the demonstrations of piqueteros, the public expression of rejection of the ruling class and of the judicial system, the devaluation of the currency and the hyperinflation that followed, physical insecurity and acts of violence against persons and property, the progressive loss of confidence in the public security forces, among others.

From within our profession as psychologists, committed to matters of health — in the most general sense of physical, psychosocial and spiritual well-being —, we could not fail to perceive that the majority of the population, individually or in the groups to which it belongs, seemed to have been affected in its well-being to varying degrees and in different ways.

In our experience in private practice or in public health institutions, we received daily messages that helped us to detect, in a non-systematic way, how far and in what way people felt flouted in their human dignity, in their values and their principles of life, in the quality of their most significant bonds, and in their attitudes towards themselves and towards others.

This perception led us to design a piece of research that we began in our city and among the middle-class population: partly because research requires that certain constants be defined, and partly because we thought a priori that this social class had been particularly affected in its vision of the world. We shall analyse here some of the significant data we gathered during a preliminary stage, carried out with the methodological collaboration of D^r Liliana Tauber, the participation of students on the psychology programme, and the support of our Universidad Católica de Santa Fe.

We started from the conception according to which individuals are always immersed in contexts of meaning and of interaction which influence and transform them, and to which they also react by adapting in different ways, and at different levels of insertion: as persons, in the closest groups such as the couple or the family, in our social networks and in the institutions to which we belong. Each of these levels is connected to the others and interdependent with them; in other words, a change in one of them affects the others and is affected by them.

For the purposes of this research — and in connection with the conception we have just described —, we shall consider the concepts of stress, trauma and resilience, in order to apply them to the analysis and the understanding of the phenomena observed.

Our objectives

Our objectives were the following:

• to detect to what extent the population had undergone the impact of the events that took place between 2001 and 2003;
• to determine which of these events had been perceived by the respondents as intense social stressors;
• to determine what the negative or stressful effects were that they had perceived at the different levels, individual and group;
• to determine what the adaptive or resilient behaviours were that they had put to work in order to reduce or relieve the perceived damage.

Working methodology

The methodology involved several stages.

1. The construction of the survey questionnaire

A first pilot survey was constructed with open questions, and was administered to fifty subjects from Santa Fe and the Federal Capital. On the basis of the answers obtained, the categories of the definitive survey were elaborated by agreement among the researchers.

These agreements led to formalising, depending on the question, between twelve and thirty-three categories.

The questionnaire consists mostly of closed alternatives with scale items (Cohen and Manion, 1990) and of a few open questions. The answers were quantified from 1 to 6 for the following categories: “very slightly intense”, “slightly intense”, “intense”, “fairly intense”, “very intense”, “no opinion”.

2. The sampling plan

It comprises three stages of quantitative data processing.

1^st stage: stratification of the neighbourhoods of the city of Santa Fe. To this end, we gathered information from the census and from the permanent household survey of the city of Santa Fe, whose source was the “Programa de Información sobre Municipios” of INDEC, in minimal observation units (census fractions and districts).

The PRINEM database provided us, by census district, with information on the following variables:

• number of industrial, commercial and service premises;
• number of occupied private dwellings;
• number of collective dwellings;
• number of unoccupied dwellings;
• total population;
• number of people attending an educational establishment;
• number of people who have never attended an educational establishment;
• number of people no longer attending, but having attended, an educational establishment;
• number of households in a situation of overcrowding;
• number of households without toilets.

Each neighbourhood was identified with its corresponding fractions and districts, which made it possible to obtain, for each of them, a quantification in terms of the variables indicated. Finally we grouped the neighbourhoods by means of a cluster analysis — a statistical method of grouping observation units according to their proximity in terms of distance. This made it possible to construct strata of neighbourhoods, approximately classified as belonging to the “upper class”, the “middle class” or the “working class”. We thus selected the neighbourhoods whose characteristics were those of the “middle class”.

2^nd stage: delimitation of each of the neighbourhoods selected at the previous stage. At this stage it was a matter of delimiting each neighbourhood retained, by identifying its boundaries and its streets.

3^rd stage: drawing lots for the block in the neighbourhoods retained at the first stage. The blocks of each neighbourhood were numbered so as to make it possible to draw lots for them. Simple random sampling was carried out to select each of the blocks.

A classification and a selection also bore on the age and the sex that the respondents had to have. The ages were distributed as follows: from 18 to under 30, from 30 to under 40, from 40 to under 50, from 50 to under 60, and 60 or over. Each interviewer had to select, in each household, the person who would answer the survey, in order to gather the opinions of people of different ages and sexes.

The preliminary sample analysed for the present work is of fifty subjects.

Stress, trauma and resilience

[The journal interrupts the text here, then takes it up again further on.]

The scientific literature developed over the last fifteen years does not insist on the differentiation between stress and trauma when the focus of the analysis is resilience. This distinction is valid when it comes to putting professional therapeutic procedures to work, but not when we focus on the subjects’ own capacities for recovery…