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Abstract
Yin noted the requirement for social workers to provide ‘supportive, empowering and strengths-based (resilience building) services’ and asked ‘when the workers themselves are burning out … do we provide the same for them?’. Many researchers have since explored this question, seeking explanations as to how some social workers survive and thrive and others are lost to the profession. The authors of this small exploratory study were interested in exploring practitioners’ understanding of resilience. A qualitative approach was employed to explore practitioner views about what contributed to their own resilience, augmented by data gathered in interviews with those providing supervision to students. Findings suggest a conceptual framework incorporating three aspects of resilience: core attributes within the individual, the practice context and a series of mediating factors. Participant accounts suggested a multifaceted and dynamically balanced awareness of resilience that highlighted the relational and contextual characteristics of their experience. This article reports one significant theme emerging from the study; namely that supervision and collegial support are recognised as vital in the nurturing of practitioner resilience.
Acknowledgement
The authors wish to thank the project participants for sharing their stories of their own journeys as resilient practitioners.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Liz Beddoe
Liz Beddoe is an Associate Professor at the School of Counselling, Human Services and Social Work in the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her teaching and research interests include critical perspectives on social work education, professional supervision and the media framing of social problems. She has published articles on supervision and professional issues in New Zealand and international journals. She has co-authored Best Practice in Professional Supervision: A Guide for the Helping Professions (2010, Jessica Kingsley Publishers) with Allyson Davys and Mapping Knowledge for Social Work Practice: Critical Intersections, with Jane Maidment (2009, Cengage). Correspondence to: Liz Beddoe, School of Counselling, Human Services and Social Work, Faculty of Education, University of Auckland, 74 Epsom Ave, Epsom, Private Bag 92-601, Auckland 1150, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]
Allyson Mary Davys
Allyson Mary Davys is the Director of Centre for Health and Social Practice at the Waikato Institute of Technology, Hamilton, New Zealand. She teaches and researches in the field of professional supervision. She co-authored Best Practice in Professional Supervision: A Guide for the Helping Professions (2010, Jessica Kingsley Publishers) with Liz Beddoe and published Davys, A., and L. Beddoe. 2009. “The Reflective Learning Model: Supervision of Social Work Students.” Social Work Education 28 (8): 919–935
Carole Adamson
Carole Adamson is a senior lecturer in social work at the University of Auckland, where her research and teaching focuses on mental health, trauma, resilience and stress. She has research interests in developing resilient practitioners and social work curriculum for disaster preparation and response. She has partnered with Liz Beddoe and Allyson Davys in two other research articles on practitioner resilience and authored “Supervision is not Politically Innocent” (Australian Social Work, 2011). A major focal point in her work is the articulation of theoretical perspectives and frameworks for social work practice that can integrate current, contextually aware best practice and which can effectively be applied in practice settings