Let's talk about our feelings: Emotional labour of community practice in times of pandemic

Abstract

From the earliest days of the Covid‐19 pandemic, which disproportionately affected marginalised communities around the world, community practice had assumed a critical role on the front lines of the social services' response to the pandemic. While scholars have devoted growing attention to community practice in normal and crisis times, little is known about the emotions of community practitioners and how they deal with them in order to do their job well. Drawing on Hochschild's concept of ‘emotional labour,’ this study examines how community social workers confronted the emotions they felt during the Covid‐19 pandemic so as to meet the requirements of their job. We address this question by drawing on in‐depth interviews with 30 community social workers in the public social services in Israel. Our research shows that community social workers experienced a wide range of interrelated negative emotions, including helplessness, frustration, disappointment, and anger. In response, workers developed four distinct coping mechanisms: emotional distancing; sharing of emotions; self‐soothing; and politization. Building on Foucault's notion of ‘technologies of the self,’ our analysis reveals that Covid‐19 produced what we call ‘pandemic subjectivity’ among human service professionals.

“Each week feels like a mountain”: The impact of COVID-19 on mental health providers’ well-being and clinical work.

“…First, our study advances preliminary research (i.e., Feldman et al, 2022;Holmes et al, 2021;McFadden et al, 2021) describing how COVID-19 impacted the well-being of mental health professionals, which provides important insights into how second-line workers are faring during a global pandemic. Although recent research has examined the shift to teletherapy (Phillips et al, 2021;Rosen et al, 2020), rates of vicarious trauma (Aafjes-van Doorn et al, 2020), and experiences of shared trauma, anxiety, and zoom fatigue (Lin et al, 2021;Shklarski et al, 2021;Webster, 2021;Wiederhold, 2020), this study is among the first to qualitatively explore and present providers' experiences in their own voices.…”

“…Although research on how COVID-19 has impacted frontline health care workers’ mental health is burgeoning, significantly less attention has been devoted to the understanding the experiences of second-line workers. Some research on this topic has begun to emerge in other countries (e.g., Israel; Feldman et al, 2022; Itzhaki-Braun, 2021). Further, large-scale quantitative studies have begun to describe the experiences of trauma, grief, and burnout of second-line workers in the United States during COVID-19 (Holmes et al, 2021; McFadden et al, 2021).…”

Coping Strategies of Social Service Clients over the Course of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Qualitative Research on Social Workers in Poland

“…Te research conducted among the social workers in Israel shows that they experienced many negative emotions such as hopelessness, frustration, disappointment, and anger. As a response the workers presented four diferent mechanism of action: emotional distancing, sharing emotions, selfsoothing and politization [56]. Social workers experienced signifcant pre/post-pandemic decreases in self-care practices [57].…”