摘要
职业初期的经历对社会工作者的职业生涯影响深远,但已有研究对社会工作者职业初期,尤其是其抗逆力机制涉及较少。文章采用质性研究方法,深入访谈11名从事社会工作职业3年以内的社会工作者,研究分析其在进入社会工作职业后面临困难和挑战时,抗逆力的整体和过程性作用情况,以及其中的相互作用,探索社会工作者在这一时期的抗逆力作用机制。研究发现,社会工作人才队伍建设必须重视发挥职业初期社会工作者自身抗逆力以有效应对工作中的困难和挑战,积极适应社会工作职业。具体来看,个体中的风险性因素包括专业能力欠缺、影响工作顺利开展的个人特质;环境中的风险性因素包括一系列的职业困境和挑战,这些困境和挑战打破了社会工作者原有平衡。而应对这些困难时,社会工作者可利用的保护性因素包括个体和环境两个方面,个体内在保护因素包括认同感、目标感、乐观感、主动性和反思能力等,来自环境的支持包括朋辈群体、家庭、老师、机构、社会政策等方面。通过不同方式的应对,在社会工作者抗逆力作用机制下,实现对平衡的重构、恢复和丧失性重构。
Social workers generally face the higher risk of job-related stress and burnout than other professionals,though social workers are professionals engaged in providing social services to help disadvantaged people including the people with high burnout.High job burnout of social workers is an important challenge in social work field in China,and it is closely related to the high turnover rates of social workers.Resilience is an important psychological mechanism for coping with job-related stress and burnout,and is an adaptive process that uses perianal and system resources to support the functional results that seem unlikely to be achieved because of the existence of risks.All social workers must go through the initial stage of their profession.This is the first stage that determines social workers professional development,and even directly affects whether they continue to engage in social work profession.In the initial stage of their profession,social workers effectively establish their own resilience mechanism,which is of great significance for them to effectively deal with the difficulties and challenges at work,actively adapt to the social work profession,and effectively cope with burnout in their long-term social work profession in the future.However,existing studies have neglected the resilience mechanism of social workers in the initial stage of their profession.Therefore,it is necessary to explore and study how the resilience of new social workers can help them effectively deal with the difficulties and challenges at work.This study adopts qualitative methodology.Purposeful sampling and heterogeneous sampling were used.In-depth and semi-structured interviewed with 11 social workers(nine were women(81.8%),with an average age of 26.1 years,all of whom had received higher education in social work(62.6%were masters in social work))who have been engaged in social work field for less than 3 years.We used NVivo 12 plus software,and adopted the analysis and coding strategy of"meaningbased analysis and coding".After repeatedly reading and coding,we analyzed the overall and procedural effects of interviewees’resilience and the interaction among them when the social workers at their beginning of profession face difficulties and challenges at work,and explore the role of resilience mechanism in the initial stage of social workers.The findings show that social workers in the initial stage not only face the external dilemmas and challenges,such as the conflict between professional and non-professional,the conflict between quality and quantity in work,the pressure from administrative issues and management in social work service organizations,and the disapproval of social work profession from society,but also face the inherent risk factors,such as the trait and character of being unsociable and insufficient professional competences.All of these may break the original balance of new social workers and become the starting point of the mechanism of resilience.The mechanism of resilience is to play a mediating role of protective factors in the process of resilience.These protective factors include intrinsic protective factors and environmental supporting factors.The intrinsic protective factors of the individual include the sense of identity,purpose,optimism,initiative and reflective ability,etc.The environmental supporting factors include peer groups,families,professional teachers,organizations,and social policies,etc.Based on these protective factors,the resilience mechanism forms three types of coping strategy:problem-centric coping strategy,emotion-centric coping strategy,and from problem-centric to emotion-centric coping strategy.Using these coping strategies,if the difficulties and challenges at work are effectively resolved,the new social workers’resilience will be reconstructed and increased to a higher level,so that new social workers effectively deal with the job-related stress and burnout.Conversely,if social workers in the initial stage try all coping strategies and still cannot balance their own state,they fail to reconstruction their resilience.In this case,the new social workers often choose to leave their jobs,or even leave the social work profession.Correspondingly,the resilience process of social workers in the initial stage can be divided into three stages,namely the starting point,process and result of resilience.Totally,the resistance mechanism is a complex dynamic process.By summarizing the study findings,we propose following suggestions:(1)it is important for social work service organizations to improve their professionalism and standardize their management level;(2)the training to the new social workers should be suitable and pertinent;(3)new social workers should make good use of the emotional support from peer groups,families,etc.(4)social support,especially professional identity and recognition from social network,is very important for the social workers in the initial stage;(5)further improving and promoting the policy for the development of social work to provide more guarantees for the social workers.
作者
张欢
陈月
ZHANG Huan;CHEN Yue
出处
《社会工作》
2021年第5期28-41,102,103,共16页
Journal of Social Work
