Measuring secondary traumatic stress in therapists: A systematic review.

OBJECTIVE: Secondary traumatic stress (STS) can have significant deleterious effects on clinicians' personal and professional lives and hinder the quality of care they deliver. However, the STS research is currently limited by methodological inconsistencies in both how it is measured and the populations studied, making it difficult to draw comprehensive conclusions. This review's purpose is to provide an updated overview of how the concept of STS has been measured specifically in therapy-offering clinicians and offer recommendations for future research and clinical practice. METHOD: Five databases (APA PsycInfo, Medline, Embase, Scopus, Web of Science) were searched for quantitative, peer-reviewed studies on STS in mental health clinicians published in English up to December 2024. A descriptive metasynthesis summarized means, standard deviations, and score ranges of commonly used measures. A reliability generalization analysis was conducted using extracted internal consistency coefficients. RESULTS: A total of 49 studies met the inclusion criteria, and seven different instruments used to measure STS were identified. The most popular measures were the Professional Quality of Life Scale (Stamm, 2010) and the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale (Bride et al., 2004), which assess STS from different perspectives. The reliability generalization analysis suggested acceptable and excellent internal consistencies for these measures, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: At present, no single measure is available to capture the entire domain of STS. It is recommended that the choice for the most appropriate outcome measure is guided by the desired emphasis on STS symptoms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).