Job Satisfaction and Job Burnout Among Staff in a


 Battered Women Shelter


 


Introduction


During the past two decades, there has been considerable interest and research on the phenomena of job satisfaction and burnout in the social work profession (Acker, 1999). The direct contact with clients in battered women shelter and the continual responsibilities of meeting their emotional as well as their physical needs offer both intrinsic satisfaction and stresses for the providers of the services (Maslach & Jackson, 1982).


Staffs of battered women shelters carries with them immense responsibilities. However, staffs on battered women shelter is taut to have a high degree of burnout (Dekel & Peled, 2000). Burnout is defined as a negative psychological experience that is a reaction of workers to job-related stress (Ratlif, 1988). Burnout refers to a cluster of physical, emotional, and interactional symptoms, including emotional exhaustion, a sense of lacking personal accomplishment, and depersonalization of clients (Maslach & Jackson, 1982). Burnout symptoms also can include recurrent bouts of flu, headaches, fatigue, poor self-esteem, difficulty in interpersonal relationships, substance abuse, inability to concentrate, rigidity, and tendency to blame clients for their problems (Cherniss, 1980).


Becoming a professional helper in partner violence may demand an ongoing self-reflection of the worker on her or his emotions and attitudes, along with empathetic responses to past and present experiences of clients regarding abuse and victimization (Campbell et al., 1999). The findings of the current study show that once students were encouraged by their academic instructors and field supervisors to reflect on their personal emotions regarding battered women, such processes were perceived as empowering resources. However, this might not always be the prevalent state of affairs in the field. For instance, societal pressure may exist from the professional culture in academia or in the field agency to distance one’s self from victims because of their normative stigmatized position as weak and vulnerable, resulting in a patronizing attitude by professionals (e.g., Eisikovits & Buchbinder, 1996).


A shelter for battered women worker, hearing about a client being victimized, may bring to the encounter her own vulnerability and fears (Buchbinder and Goldblatt, 2003). Because of similar gender, age, or intimate relationship status (Horwitz, 1998), she may become overly protective of her client and experience resentment and rage toward the abuser for his dominating behavior against his partner. The encounter with abused women may also provoke anger and criticism on the worker’s side (e.g., “how can they stay together?”), identification with the victim, and concern for one’s own and family members’ safety (e.g., “it might happen to me, too;” Iliffe & Steed, 2000).


 


Background of the Study


            It is seldom recognized that social workers have been working with abused women since the early twentieth century. These early social workers addressed their needs for shelter, food, clothing, advocacy, and legal assistance, with the provision of housing and employment services serving as the means for keeping these women away from their abusive partners (Edelson, 1991).


Partner violence may become a magnifying mirror of the worker’s everyday disputes in his or her family around issues such as intimacy, child-rearing practices, and decision making. Encountering family violence may also revive recollections of exposure to violence in the worker’s family of origin (Iliffe & Steed, 2000). Hence, intervening with family violence requires awareness of workers to their attitudes and emotions, as well as to their differential reactions when interacting with perpetrators or victims of partner violence.


 


Statement of the Problem


In a profession that is client centered and requires emotional involvement that puts stress on service providers, it is not uncommon to have emotionally drained and chronically frustrated shelter workers (Beemsterboer & Baum, 1984; Maslach, 1982). These workers are likely to be unable to deal with the inevitable stresses of their job, and this failure to cope can result in a number of negative consequences, including impaired performance, low morale, absenteeism, and high turnover (Beemsterboer & Baum, 1984).


This proposed study seeks to investigate the effects of battered women shelters on the staffs of the shelter in terms of their job satisfaction and job burnout. Moreover, other effects on staffs shall also be outlined such as performance, low morale, absenteeism, and high turnover.


Specifically, the following questions shall be answered:


1.    What are the effects of working on a battered women shelter on employee job satisfaction and job burnout?


2.    What are the differences in shelter staffs  in terms of the employees demographic variables?


3.    What are the reactions of the shelter employees in terms of performance, low morale, absenteeism, and high turnover?


4.    Does their experiences unique to the battered women shelters?


 


Scope and Limitations


            This proposed study is limited to only three (3) battered women shelters which will be [purposively sampled in one state. The findings may not necessarily reflect the effects of working in this shelter on other states or countries for that matter.


 


Significance of the Study


Today, many women are treated through shelter programs, which offer a wide range of services (Dziegielewski, Resnick and Krause, 1996). Currently, the shelter setting still remains the primary recourse available to women and children fleeing abusive situations (Dziegielewski, Resnick and Krause, 1996). It is important to note that approximately one-third to two-thirds of women who remain in shelters for several weeks do not return to their abusive partners. The women in shelters also report less depression and a greater feeling of independence.


This proposed study aims to increase the awareness of universities and students in social work on the responsibilities of staffs of battered women shelters. It may contribute in their curriculum development allowing the students to face the challenges in the workplace. Furthermore, it is for battered women shelters administrators to be aware and formulate policies that can boast the morale and develop the skills of their staffs. Finally, this proposed study seeks to contribute the policy-making on battered women shelters’ employee welfare.


 


Review of Related Literature


Job satisfaction is defined as a positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job situation and is linked with the characteristics and demands of one’s work (Arches, 1991). The work-related satisfaction of helping people, achieving change and improvement, and promoting their growth has important implications for social workers’ behaviors at work, their desire to continue in their work, and their involvement in the job and with their clients (Beemsterboer & Baum, 1984).


The literature offers a complex etiological model of burnout, emphasizing the interaction of individual, organizational, and societal factors (Schaufeli, Maslach, & Marek, 1993). The nature of human services occupations often attracts people who are empathetic and sensitive and who tend to be people oriented but who are also anxious, introverted, and overenthusiastic. Often the need to help others is exaggerated and is based on low self-esteem and unrealistic goals, factors associated with the burnout phenomenon (Poulin & Walter, 1993). Certain demographic variables, including age, marital status, and gender also were found to be related to burnout Poulin & Walter, 1993).


Many have argued that intervention with partner violence (i.e., between intimate partners, both married and unmarried) evokes the basic issues related to gender asymmetry and power relationships, and therefore induces intensive involvement of the worker (Buchbinder & Goldblatt, 1999). The current literature is limited concerning the impact on social workers of working with family violence, including all types of intrafamilial forms of violence (Buchbinder and Goldblatt, 2003). It deals mainly with counter transference, vicarious trauma, stress, and burnout and their impact on worker functioning in professional and private domains (Azar, 2000; Dekel & Peled, 2000). Some writings warn against the danger of vicarious trauma for workers who are vulnerable to the impact of clients’ traumatic experiences (Horwitz, 1998; Iliffe & Steed, 2000). These effects may influence workers who deal with all kinds of trauma cases. However, the changes occurring in workers’ intimate lives, interpersonal expectations, and the structure of their identity were not addressed.


In spite of these influences, there has been little writing about training or worker preparation in this domain, which focuses on the needs of workers rather than the needs of clients. The scant literature that refers to this topic mainly stresses the importance of worker training as a means for improving the services provided to clients (Campbell, Raja, & Grining, 1999). For instance, workers are supervised to be sensitive toward abused women and avoid revictimizing their clients by judgmental attitudes (Campbell et al., 1999). In-service training programs to intervene with family violence include the social, psychological, interpersonal, and intrapersonal aspects of the phenomenon. Students and workers are encouraged to reflect on their attitudes, feelings, and reactions concerning gender relationships and power inequity (Enns et al., 1997). However, how these reflections affect their lives and professional identities is seldom addressed. This absence is even more conspicuous when examining social work students. They tend to be inexperienced and have limited exposure as to how to integrate experiences with clients into their own life history, which may have similar, if not identical, abusive experiences.


Another aspect that is documented in the literature is that the intensive exposure to battered women’s and other victims’ life narratives may threaten gender values and belief systems of workers which might result in vicarious trauma (Iliffe & Steed, 2000).


Domestic violence, or intimate male violence against women, has been recognized as a serious and pervasive social problem, with over 1.5 million women being assaulted by intimate partners or ex-partners each year (Bybee and Sullivan, 2002; Miller & Wellford, 1997). One component of domestic violence includes batterers isolating women from their friends and family, an effective strategy in maintaining power and control over them (Ptacek, 1997).


To redress the often inadequate or ineffective responses battered women receive from their communities, the majority of domestic violence service programs engage in various forms of advocacy on women’s behalf (Peled & Edleson, 1994). These advocacy efforts generally involve paraprofessionals, working collaboratively and respectfully with individual survivors who guide the focus of the intervention to meet their specific needs and desires. Such community-based advocacy interventions have received scant evaluation, and the belief in their effectiveness has largely been predicated on anecdotal evidence.


Social support and access to community resources are both well-supported in prior literature as potential mediators of intervention effects on quality of life. Social support has been shown to have beneficial effects on well-being across a variety of populations (Collins, Dunkel-Schetter, Label, & Scrimshaw, 1993). Prior research has suggested that social support helps to mitigate the damaging effects of domestic violence (Kemp, Green, Hovanitz, & Rawlings, 1995) and may protect women from further abuse (Tan, Basta, Sullivan, & Davidson, 1995). For women with abusive partners, supportive people have been hypothesized to provide access to opportunities, support, and information that can protect women from batterers’ violence and threats.


 


Methodology


This research shall utilize a phenomenological-qualitative research in determining the effects of battered women shelter on the staffs job satisfaction, job burn out and other emotional and professional effects. In phenomenological-qualitative research there is no expectation for reliability due to the idiosyncratic influence of the research context (Creswell, 1998). Thus, although this study does not allow for generalizations, it enables us to learn more in-depth about shelter staffs’ experiences of the encounter with battered women. In this sense, the emphasis moves from validity to validation, from a definitive version of reality to a process of intersubjective agreement and validation between researchers and readers (Angen, 2000).


Data analysis shall follow the phenomenological paradigm. Phenomenology is the study of phenomena, things or events, in the everyday world from the viewpoint of the experiencing persons and the meanings these situations have to them (Becker, 1992; Spinelli, 1996). Experience is one source of one’s knowledge about self, other, and world. Becker (1992) argues that meaning is co-created by the interaction between the self and other. The researcher working within the phenomenological tradition aims at understanding the meaning of lived experiences by descriptive means, that is, what people experience and how they interpret the life-world (Moustakas, 1994). Shelter staffs are viewed as active meaning makers whose experiences are expressed in their narratives which interweave personal, interpersonal, and social realities (e.g., Becker, 1992;).


As explained in the analysis, primary source of data involves in-depth interviews that will be analyzed inductively (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). To measure the job satisfaction and job burnout level of shelter staffs, a standardized survey questionnaire shall be distributed to the participants. This will serve as a supplementary data on the interview that will be conducted. The secondary source of data will come from thesis, journal articles, books and researches on job satisfaction, job burnout and on literature in psychology relating to the effects of battered women shelter on staff reactions.


 


Respondents of the Study

This proposed research will be conducted with thirty (30) staffs of three (3) battered women shelters. The shelters shall be purposively sampled as being in one state near the researcher. From the list of the battered women shelter, ten staffs from those who will agree to participate in the study shall be randomly sampled. They will be surveyed and interviewed.


  Procedure

Data will be gathered by tape recording in-depth, semi-structured interviews which will last approximately 2 hours each and will be later transcribed. This process provided an opportunity for open conversation to obtain rich descriptive data about the experience of working with abused women for shelter staffs.


 


Ethical Considerations

All participants should agree voluntarily to participate in the study following a brief explanation of the general aims of the research. Participation in the study will be on a strictly voluntary basis. All participants shall first give their consent before they are considered respondents of the study. In addition, the interviews shall take place on the time and place convenient for the respondents. Moreover,  confidentiality will be sufficiently preserved.


 


Analysis


Data analysis will be performed according to the phenomenological method (Spinelli, 1989). The basic assumption in this approach is that the researcher’s subjective perspectives inevitably shape the research findings (Boss, Dahl, & Kaplan, 1996). First, the rule of epoche (Moustakas, 1994) urges the researcher to set aside her or his prior biases and prejudices and to suspend any expectations and assumptions. Thus, the main categories that emerged in the process of data analysis are assumed to represent the participants’ experience rather than the researchers’ a priori presumptive categories.


Next, the rule of description urges the researcher to describe rather than explain, to remain initially focused on his or her immediate impressions of the phenomenon, and to preserve a level of analysis in relation to these experiences that focuses on description rather than theoretical explanation (Spinelli, 1989). Accordingly, the findings will be organized in themes by the original citations.


 


References


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