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Psychological First Aid (PFA) is practiced worldwide. This practice in English is guided through a small collection of training manuals. Despite ubiquitous practice and formal training materials, little is known about what topics are covered and in what depth in each of these influential manuals. As such, we analyzed the topic structure of these training manuals. The objective was to model the PFA manuals' topics with the goal of identifying a set of topics with recurrent themes and evaluating the extent to which each manual demonstrated those themes. This machine learning study employed an unsupervised topic modeling design using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The variables are (1) the distribution of a word across documents and (2) the distribution of a word across topics. The level of measurement for all variables is continuous. The unit of analysis is words. Preprocessing and data analysis were accomplished using the Orange Data Mining Toolbox (Demšar et al., 2013). This program is a Python GUI. Results indicated a nine-topic structure to the universe of the English PFA training manuals. These topics were: (1) Training Materials, (2) MHPSS Training, (3) PFA Orientation Activities, (4) Academics of PFA, (5) Specific Helper Instructions, (6) PFA Curriculum, (7) Serving Refugees PFA, (8) Organization Based PFA, and (9) Community Based Applications. The depth of discourse on each topic varied widely between manuals. Topics 4 and 9 showed the strongest relationships in the corpus. The Academics of PFA topic shows a strong representation of the corpus and suggest current training manuals have stayed true to its evidence-based practice. The topic of Community-Based Applications strongly represents the corpus and suggests that training models incorporate community-based applications. The scientific foundation and practical implementation of the training guides are essential elements. Limitations and implications were also discussed.
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