Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry

Objectives : Social workers can suffer from occupational stress resulting from dealing with clients, which might lead to metal health problems. We aimed to investigate the association of duty-related traumatic experiences and stress coping strategies with post-traumatic stress symptoms among social workers in public sector.

Methods : A total of 110 social workers in public sector (men 30.9%, 36.5 ± 7.6 yrs) participated in this study. All subjects were evaluated the frequency and the impact of duty-related traumatic events. Additionally, they completed questionnaires including the Impact of Event Scale-Revised for post-traumatic stress symptoms, the Beck Depression Inventory-II for depressive symptoms, the Scale for Suicidal Ideation for suicide symptoms and the Ways of Coping Checklist for stress coping strategies.

Results : The most frequent traumatic events were "Violent or abusive language from a client" (95.0%) and "Client made a fuss" (94.5%). The most distressing traumatic event was "Seeing a dead body on duty" (7.6 out of 10), which predicted post-traumatic stress symptoms (odds ratio 4.04 ; 95% confidence interval, 1.79-9.11). Among 4 types of stress coping strategies, the emotion-focused coping was positively correlated with post-traumatic stress symptoms after controlling age and sex (β = 0.50, p < 0.001).

Conclusions : Social workers in public sector showed high level of post-traumatic stress symptoms. Duty-related traumatic events and the emotional-focused coping strategies were associated with the severity of post-traumatic stress symptoms. The modification of stress coping strategies would alleviate post-traumatic stress symptoms in social workers in public sector.

Keywords Traumatic events;Post-traumatic stress symptoms;Stress coping strategies;Social workers.