Self-care of social pedagogy and social work students and practitioners

This Master’s thesis discusses self-care strategies used by Social Pedagogy and Social Work students and/or professionals, either at work or in private. In the theoretical part of the thesis, I present the characteristics of working as a helping professional and various consequences of such work, such as secondary traumatic stress, compassion fatigue, professional burnout... Moreover, I explain the importance of self-care for helping professions at their workplace, as well as during their university training and explore a few approaches to self-care on a professional and personal level. The empirical part of the thesis covers twelve students and professionals’ experience of work strain and what self-care techniques they use. Furthermore, I am interested in finding out to what extent they have been equipped in self-care techniques by their universities and what the institutions could improve in regards to equipping future professionals with skills to handle challenges and strains at work. The research results show that the interviewees face quite different work strains, which arise both from the external factors (working with clients, work overload, shift-work…) as well as from their psychological characteristics (workaholism, perfectionism, lack of personal boundaries…). The interviewees practice different ways of self-care on a professional, social, organisational, psychological and physical level, although these techniques are unique to each individual and they suit their own needs and character. The results regarding university programmes show that while students do receive a variety of skills and knowledge regarding self-care, they find there is a lack of practical and experiential content on this topic, as well as a need for more frequent feedback on their work