Peer Support Among Clinical Social Workers in Montana: A Promising Strategy to Address Secondary Traumatic Stress and Other Work-Related Stressors

Purpose: Peer support, or the intentional provision of supportive services to persons in similar life experiences, is a phenomenon that has been well documented in mental health. Although less studied in other areas, there are examples of worker-to-worker support efforts that have been used to buffer the impacts of work-related stress and to provide social workers with supportive and positive learning environments in which to work. In New York, peer support was a key component of a “teaming” model to child welfare service delivery (Lawson, 2008). The core concept suggests that formal types of help received from a peer/colleague also working within human service delivery setting will increase feelings of support, improve ability to handle work-related stress, and decrease the impacts of secondary, or vicariously experienced trauma. Such peer support does not supplant clinical or task supervision, but provides an augmented means for social workers to attend to emotional and intellectual needs outside of the confines of traditional organizational structures.

Methods: This study was part of a larger study using mixed methods to explore relationships between secondary traumatic stress and professional quality of life (e.g. job satisfaction) examining secondary traumatic stress among licensed clinical social workers in Montana. Included in the original mail survey (N=256) were a series of original questions asking respondents to describe ways in which they receive peer support from colleagues and assess the perceived importance of such support. Template analysis was used with a subsample of 15 for the collection and analysis of qualitative data. Credibility of qualitative findings was evaluated through a member checking process.

Results: The licensed social workers in our sample reported high use of informal peer support and little to no presence of formal peer support structures in their organizations. Among our findings were differences in gender (X2=.128, p=.045), age (X2 = .169, p=.031), and time in current job (X2 =.184, p=.017), with women, younger social workers, and having less tenure in a position being significantly associated with likelihood to talk to peers about difficulties and stress in their work. Respondents who indicated that they were currently looking for other work were significantly less likely (X 2= -.157, p=.019) than others to report having emotional connectedness with peers/colleagues. Additionally, qualitative findings reinforce the perceived importance of peer support as a mediator in the experience of secondary traumatic stress and other job-related stress. Qualitative respondents expressed a strong desire for more structured opportunities to participate in peer support mechanisms in their workplace.

Implications for Practice: The use of intentional and workplace-encouraged peer support represents both a low-cost preventive intervention to decrease job strain and burnout and a shift in traditional paradigms regarding service delivery settings and supervision. With social workers increasingly working in stressful settings with traumatized populations, the need for interventions aimed to better support workers with job-related stress is critical. Peer mentors, peer debriefing groups, peer supervision, and peer trauma specialists are among the many types of promising interventions built on peer support principles in social work settings.