As an adoptee from Taiwan growing up in San Antonio, Texas, Priscilla Hefley struggled to find her identity.

To avoid being seen as an outsider, she embraced the mainstream culture. It wasn’t until college that she began to reconnect with her roots and what it meant to be a Chinese American.

“Adoptees can have a sense of not really being American and not really being Chinese,” she said. “It was a real struggle. Where exactly do I fit?”

That experience prompted Hefley to pursue a career path involving international adoptions, bringing her to the master’s program at the USC School of Social Work, where she is conducting research on the effects of childhood trauma.

Specifically, Hefley is reviewing a collection of video testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust and genocides in Armenia; Rwanda; and Nanjing, China, that is housed at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. She hopes to identify patterns of trauma across cultures that can be addressed in early life to avoid negative outcomes in adolescence and adulthood.

After filtering the archival material by language, age at the time of trauma and experience as an adoptee or orphan, Hefley has started searching for objective symptoms such as intrusive memories, hyperarousal and numbing.

“If we can identify some of the outcomes that are likely, certainly not inevitable but possible, we can prevent, for example, a lot of inappropriate placements for adoptees or foster children,” she said. “We can prevent being shuffled through the system because that just imparts more trauma on the child.”

A personal passion

Hefley has always had a fascination with how the human mind can adapt and handle traumatic events. As an undergraduate student beginning to reconnect with her own experience as an adoptee, she decided that she wanted to find a way to help others process childhood trauma.

Initially planning to produce documentaries about adoptees to raise awareness, she earned a degree in film and television production from University of Arizona. She went on to complete a master’s in business administration to complement her film skills, but found she enjoyed the interpersonal side of business more than operations, leading her to pursue an MSW at USC.

Her long-term vision is to develop an international organization focused on helping orphans and adoptees deal with traumatic experiences.

“Knowing I wanted to work with families, how can I be best prepared?” she said. “There is something within each person that can allow them to pull through, and I’m fascinated and wanted to know more about that. There was no way to do that without research.”

Seeking guidance

Hefley approached Hazel Atuel, a research assistant professor who taught her first-year research methods class, for guidance on developing a research project related to the effects of childhood trauma on the brain. Atuel immediately thought of the Shoah Foundation archives, essentially a rich collection of firsthand interview data with high relevance to Hefley’s interests and background.

“My goal was to make this research experience a meaningful one for Priscilla,” Atuel commented.

After researching cognitive and affective indicators of trauma, Hefley began narrowing down the archives to individuals who spoke English, were between 5 and 11 years old at the time of the traumatic experience, and had experience as an adoptee or orphan.

Having reviewed only a handful of video testimonies, she has started to identify common patterns across cultures and is considering how that information could inform her future work, such as developing an educational program for parents whose adoptive child begins withdrawing socially or exhibiting other symptoms of trauma.

“She is already beginning to make links between research and practice,” Atuel said. “It’s very exciting to see that what we talk about in the classroom is becoming real to her. It really has implications for her social work practice and long-term goals.”

A hallmark of graduates

Given the school’s revised curriculum that emphasizes a strong connection between research and practice in social work, Atuel said students like Hefley can serve as ambassadors to their classmates, highlighting how they can engage in research that is highly relevant to their personal interests.

“This is becoming a hallmark of MSW graduates from USC,” she said. “They understand the value of research and how to use it to inform their practice.”

Although Hefley acknowledged that her inherent analytic mindset led her to embrace the step-by-step nature of the research process, she said the human component of her research project has sustained her excitement and engagement.

She hopes to review approximately 15 to 20 testimonies for each historical event reflected in the Shoah Foundation archives, with plans to present and publish her findings for academic and clinical audiences.

“It’s been this consistent thread throughout my life—being an adoptee, working with adoptees and advocating for them, and now researching for them,” she said. “I think it’s pretty cool that I can maybe make a difference for these children in other countries.”