“I Feel You”: Locus of Control, Resilience and Empathy as Predictors of Compassion Fatigue among Caseworkers dealing with Abused victims within Metro Manila

Abstract

Frontline social workers in the Philippines are often exposed to the various kinds and intense levels of traumatic materials posed by their clients as they are required to engage in an interactive communication with them. Because of this, Compassion Fatigue, or the reduced capacity or interest in being empathic as a result from helping or wanting to help a traumatized person among social workers is not viewed as a new concept. However, in spite of the apparent inclination of professionals in the social work field to develop compassion fatigue, it seems that not everyone is at risk of developing this work-related psychological condition. In order to understand further compassion fatigue, one of the initial steps which should be taken is to determine the reasons, factors or variables that will help to identify the point of vulnerabilities that affects its development. This study aims to determine the predictability of compassion fatigue among social workers who are dealing with clients suffering from a trauma using three personality variables namely: locus of control, resilience, and empathy. Using a quantitative design, this study attempted to measure the levels of locus of control, resilience, empathy of the respondents and identified their relationship with the person‘s level of compassion fatigue. One-hundred five (105) self-administered questionnaires were completed and analyzed using Pearson‘s Correlation and Regression analysis. Scoring of the scales show that the Resilience and Empathy of the respondents are high, while their locus of control is moderate and compassion fatigue is low. Correlation analysis also shows that locus of control and resilience has statistically significant and negative relationship with compassion fatigue, whereas empathy does not. In terms of the predictability of Compassion Fatigue using Locus of Control, Resilience and Empathy, the independent variables all present a very weak contribution to the total variation of the scores in the dependent variable.