Abstract:
The aim of this exploratory study was to determine whether victims of crime who
have encountered face-to-face interventions with lay counsellors, perceive these
interventions as helpful, hindering or having no effect on their ability to cope after a
traumatic incident. Five participants were selected for this qualitative study. A
semi-structured interview schedule was constructed by the researcher to guide the
interview process and thematic content analysis was used to analyse the data. The
main emergent themes related to symptoms experienced by participants, time,
victim support centres, perceptions of lay counsellors, short-term interventions, the
model used and the participants overall perceptions of the services rendered by lay
counsellors. Although the results were too varied to conclude the perceived
effectiveness of interventions, the results are invaluable in gaining an in-depth
understanding of the perceived impact of the services rendered by lay counsellors
and what factors influence these perceptions.
