Published on October 13, 2022 by Leighton Doores  
Olivia Whited

Olivia Whited grew up in a missionary community and moved overseas with her family when she was nine years old. She saw firsthand the challenges and issues that missionaries face. When Whited began taking classes in human development and family science (HDFS) at Samford University’s Orlean Beeson School of Education, she had the opportunity to look further into some of these issues.

With a minor in religion, Whited could see the correlation between what she was studying in her HDFS courses and what she was learning in her religion courses.

“I wanted to look further into why trauma-informed care training isn’t prevalent within the church and within missionary organizations especially seeing how beneficial it is to all the helping professions that we study within HDFS like child advocacy centers, parenting programs, and welfare systems,” Whited said.

For her capstone research project in HDFS, Whited chose to specifically research the stigmas that exist among Christian international missionaries toward individuals with mental illnesses versus Christian missionaries who live in their home country.

“Missionaries have a very relationally driven career, so they could be interacting more frequently with people who have mental illnesses or who are trauma-affected,” Whited explained. “I wanted to research this with the hope that it builds a foundation for more research to be done to ultimately see why a lot of missionaries and missionary organizations aren’t requiring trauma-informed training before they go overseas.”

Whited found no significant difference between the Christian international missionaries and those who have only exclusively lived in their home country.

“At the end of my paper and my research, I wanted to emphasize that churches need to recognize and acknowledge their role, even if they don’t go overseas or have missionaries to support to go overseas, that the cultures they are cultivating wherever they are, will bleed over into where missionaries go.”

Whited created a survey and solicited participation via social media. Since she grew up in a missionary community, she already had an extensive network of individuals from across the globe. About 200 people responded to her survey.

Whited chose to research a topic that correlates to what she wants to do for a career after she completes her master’s degree in social work. She hopes to work with mission organizations and churches in creating child protection policies and implementing training to serve as a preventative measure for abuse. Hopefully, unsafe behaviors can be identified before they get to the point of abuse.

“I didn’t recognize the opportunity that I would be getting when I first signed up for HDFS,” said Whited. “I think there are a lot of skills that it pushed me to develop that I think are going to be valuable walking into my master’s program this fall and to my career in general.”