Coping Strategies of Social Workers

Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional model of stress and coping asserts that people will expend effort to find ways of coping with stressful situations. The transactional model describes two forms of coping: problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping. Problem-focused coping is a logical process that centers on the environment, such as gathering information, creating a strategy, and following through on it. Emotion-focused coping is handling the emotional reaction to the difficulty by approaches such as reframing the condition in an optimistic light and reaching out for sympathy and support from other people. Study results showed that social workers’ effective coping strategies buffered burnout and ineffective coping strategies were associated with burnout. Early studies indicated that problem-focused coping tended to be more effective than emotion-based coping, but one large, comprehensive, recent study showed no statistical difference between their effectiveness. They give social workers two good options.