Investigating social workers’ coping strategies towards burnout in Kwa-Zulu Natal within UMhlathuze Municipality.
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Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Zululand
Abstract
Social Workers are professionals in the human services sector who render social services to diverse populations with dissimilar personal and social problems, through empowerment, social change promotion, liberation and enhancing human relationships. While rendering these services they are exposed to higher levels of burnout. Literature suggests that social workers are at the higher risk of burnout. The question then was how Social Workers cope with their work burnout. A qualitative approach to investigate burnout coping strategies of Social Workers working in social services of UMhlathuze Municipality was employed, sample was selected following the purposive sampling procedure, and semi-structured interviews in a combination of closed-ended and open-ended questions were utilized as a data collection tool. Data collected was analysed in Thematic Data Analysis process. The research was conducted to find answers for the following questions, what burnout coping strategies are used by social workers, what are the sources of burnout in social work, what knowledge social workers have about burnout, what social services agencies offer to assist their employees with regards to burnout and lastly what is recommended as helping in addressing, preventing, and coping with burnout by social workers. Findings of the study indicated that Social Workers targeted do not interact well with their work environment, it also appeared that Social Workers apply more emotional -focused coping strategies than problem - focused coping strategies towards burnout, amongst the coping strategies, they apply both positive and negative coping strategies of burnout. This responded to the overall aim of the study of investigating social workers coping strategies through ecological perspective theory and Transactional model of stress and coping.
Description
A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Social work, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Zululand, 2020.
Keywords
Burnout, Social Worker, Social service agency, Clients