The best social worker is the one that is able to work : a qualitative study about emotions in social work

The aim of this study is to examine how emotions appear in the social work practice and what social workers described as important when coping with emotional labour. This study is based on seven qualitative interviews with social workers in Stockholm, Sweden who comes in contact with people who have a substance abuse. The data is analyzed with an instrument that is called professional quality of life which measures the positive aspects of working as a helper, compassion satisfaction, and also the negative aspects, compassion fatigue. The result shows that emotions is a central part of the social work. How the social workers talked about emotions differentiated but we noticed that the social workers more often talked about their negative emotions than their positive emotions which we found very interesting. The result also shows that the social workers experienced emotions very different but we found that all of the social workers pointed out that being able to feel good in their work environment was crucial to be able to perform at work. We found two things that were needed to feel good: resources to help the client and opportunity for an outlet and processing of emotions