Burnout and Secondary Traumatic Stress Among Intimate Partner Violence & Sexual Assault Service Providers: Individual, Job Level, and Organizational Influences

Background and Purpose: Service providers working in the areas of intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual assault (SA) provide critical services to survivors and perpetrators of violence, often under challenging circumstances. Supporting this workforce requires understanding the factors that influence worker outcomes and developing strategies to promote healthy work environments. To better understand the workplace experiences of these providers and inform organizational policies and practice, the current study examined individual, job-level, and organizational factors associated with secondary traumatic stress (STS) and burnout.

Methods: A web-based survey was disseminated among IPV/SA service providers across a single state. Nonprobability purposive sampling was used to recruit 520 participants. In addition to questions pertaining to individual and organizational demographics, primary job responsibilities and organizational climate, the survey included validated measures for burnout and STS (Stamm, 2010), exposure to microaggressions (Edmond, 2016), job satisfaction (Spector, 1994), and work-life fit (Leiter & Maslach, 2006). Univariate and bivariate analyses informed the development of two hierarchical regression models, which tested associations with burnout and STS using a multi-step approach.

Results: Respondents were 40 years old on average and had nearly nine years of experience in the field.  Half of the sample identified as survivors of adult or childhood interpersonal violence. Just over 40% identified as White and 25% identified as Latinx. Results from the hierarchical regression analyses indicated individual factors including age and exposure to a recent life stressor were associated with burnout and/or STS, while identifying as a survivor of adult or childhood trauma was not associated with either outcome. Job-level factors such as providing direct services to survivors and receiving supervision also had significant associations with burnout and STS. At the organizational level, exposure to microaggressions in the workplace linked to higher levels of STS, and higher workload, decreased sense of community at work, and less match between person and work values were all associated with higher burnout.

Conclusions and Implications: A wide range of factors influence worker well-being.  Addressing factors affecting provider burnout and STS across ecological levels could promote worker longevity and efficacy, and ultimately enhance services for survivors. Specific efforts to support staff working in direct service roles and address situations in which workloads need re-balancing may be especially helpful. Current policies in some agencies placing limits around employment of survivors of adult or childhood trauma (e.g., polices requiring an applicant to be a certain number of years post-experience) may not be as necessary to prevent burnout or STS as efforts to support all staff going through current life stressors. Similarly, addressing microaggressions in the workplace and building community within the agency could have positive benefits agency-wide.

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