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This Master's thesis research examines the emotional labor of domestic violence shelter workers primarily working with diverse populations. The theoretical framework is Hochschild's theory of emotional labor, which is work that 'requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others'. Workers can manage their feelings by changing their outward appearance, or self-inducing and displaying feelings through conscious mental work. The research data consists of the interviews of six current or former employees at two different domestic violence shelters, collected in an urban city in the United States in the summer of 2014. The interviews followed a standardized open-ended question pattern. The method of theoretically informed empirical analysis is utilized to analyze the data with guidance from Hochschild's theory. The interest of this research is to discover what kind of emotional labor is involved in work at a domestic violence shelter, and how it affects the workers' private lives. It emerges that the organizational context expects shelter workers to empower their clients, enabling them to survive independently after they leave the shelter. Workers must be mindful of a variety of matters that might affect the clients' recovery process. They react to their trauma in different ways, and their cultural perspective could explain some of the obstacles they face in leaving the abuser. The most common form of emotional labor among shelter workers appears to be the act of hiding or suppressing different emotions, such as frustration, or becoming emotionally affected. As a consequence of this labor, workers experience stress and mistrust of men, yet consider the positive impact of helping and empowering abused women to be a great motivation. Due to the small sample size, quantitative generalizations of these findings cannot be made. However, this qualitative data and the analysis offer information about emotional labor in a very particular context; in this locality, there were discernible patterns connecting the individual interviewees. It is concluded that the satisfaction of helping others may outweigh the negative effects of emotional labor, and suggested that training for workers should include a section on this practice. |
