[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.