A Research On Community Social Workers’ Career Expectations From The Perspective Of Emotional Labor

The career expectation of social workers is the attitude tendency and career will of social workers towards the social work industry.Establishing reasonable career expectation,improving employment quality and promoting professional development are not only the core issues of practitioners’ career identity research,but also the realistic indicators for the construction of a solid social work talent team.As a helper who influences life with life,especially community social workers who play the backbone in grassroots construction,they are getting attention from the society and expectation from the public year by year,and their career expectations for work can reflect their career development to a certain extent.Community social work is a kind of high-intensity emotional labor,and this special nature of labor runs through the whole process of providing services by community social workers.If practitioners lack sufficient internal resources in their work,they are prone to burnout and occupational stress,which affect their career expectations level.Based on this,the researcher hypothesized that the career expectations of community social workers may be intrinsically and logically related to the professional characteristics of the work itself.This research takes emotional labor as the theoretical perspective and community social workers in Chengdu as the research object.By combining qualitative and quantitative research,this research investigates the career expectations of in-service community social workers in Chengdu,explores the emotional factors that affect the career planning of this group,and provides reference suggestions for community social workers to reasonably establish career expectations and solidify the community social work talent team.Based on the premise of literature research,this research summarizes the correlation between career expectations and emotional labor,determines the measurement scale and interview outline applicable to this research based on the three dimensions of career expectations and three measurable strategies of emotional labor,and uses the obtained cross-sectional tracking data to explicitly present the current situation of career expectations of community social workers in Chengdu.Among them,the community social workers who participated in the study were engaged in community social work services in different districts(cities)and counties of Chengdu.The results of the research indicate that the career expectations of the community social workers studied are at a medium level and the intensity of emotional work is moderate to high.In particular,the group tends to choose the deep-playing strategy in emotional work,and the most valued career expectation in career selection is the career development dimension,followed by the career stability dimension,and finally the career prestige dimension,and the degree of influence of different emotional labor strategies on career expectation is superficial playing,natural expression and deep-playing in descending order.Meanwhile,in emotional labor,the reasonable establishment of community social workers’ occupational expectations is the result of the joint action of individuals,organizations,and society.Therefore,based on the survey results,this study proposes emotional strategies to enhance the professional expectations of community social workers at four levels:government,community,agency,and individual social workers,in order to effectively assist community social workers to adapt to the workplace and integrate into society,help them actively mobilize the emotional support of multiple subjects,achieve self-restructuring in emotional work,strengthen the construction of community social work talent and guarantee the quality of professional services.