Burnout, compassion satisfaction, and coping strategies among child welfare workers

Abstract

The purpose of the current study was to understand the adverse conditions of burnout and compassion satisfaction and to understand what efforts are taken by child welfare workers to deal with the adverse effects of their profession, in addition to assessing the average levels of burnout and compassion satisfaction among them. The study was conducted by administering the Professional Quality of Life Scale (Stamm, 2010) on 70 child welfare workers to understand the levels of average burnout and compassion satisfaction among child welfare workers using non stratified purposive sampling technique and In-depth interviews were conducted with 5 randomly chosen participants using interview schedules developed by the researchers. Through the in-depth interviews, the researchers attempted to understand the adverse conditions that child welfare workers faced, the efforts they took to cope and the support they were given from others. The results also indicated that compassion satisfaction was found to be higher compare to burn out among child welfare workers. It was observed that active coping methods were generally preferred and good support was given by friends, family members, colleagues and employers in terms of resources, emotional expression, and problem-solving conversations. But there was no knowledge of other coping methods among the group. Hence, it was suggested that the measures may be taken to include methods to enhance compassion satisfaction while providing job training, in order to provide additional coping resources to them while simultaneously reducing burnout.