Are the future professionals from the socioeducative area aware of the risks of suffering from burnout or vicarious trauma?

Abstract

[eng] Background: Professionals who conduct socioeducative interventions (social workers, social educators, social psychologists, social pedagogs, and others) are exposed to complex situations everyday, dealing with people in vulnerable situations, who experiences and narrations are linked to traumatic situations. Professionals who work with people who had been abused, maltreated or neglected are listening to traumatic stories from them every day. These professionals are chronically exposed to this narrative, and this can end up affecting them in different ways. It is known that burnout and vicarious trauma are very present on those professionals’ lives. Objectives: Our research questions were: are these professionals getting tools and knowledge on how to prevent this burnout and this vicarious trauma when they study at the university before they start working? Are the students aware of these risks? The two main objectives for the presentation are: 1) to explore on the opinion of students of 3 degrees (social education, social work and pedagogy) from one university about the perception of the risk of burnout and vicarious trauma in their future when working with vulnerable populations; and 2) what strategies are they learning at the university (if any) to prevent burnout and vicarious trauma in their future job position. Methodology: Three focus groups with students from three different degrees had been conducted. Each focus group had between 4 and 5 participants. Content analysis was used. Results: Results will be presented highlighting 3 ideas: 1) There are different perceptions on the levels of risk to suffer burnout and vicarious trauma depending on the degree that the students are in; 2) There are some experiences of important content that seems useful to students to prevent burnout and vicarious trauma in their future job position; and 3) The methodologies that are used to teach those contents are various, depending on the teacher. Conclusions: The quality of the social intervention must be assured, and professionals who work on these services need to ready to deal with all the difficult and complex stories that people explain them. So, it is very important to prepare students who will work on those services and make sure that they have the tools and the knowledge to deal with the risk of suffering burnout or vicarious trauma.