A diary research on subjective emotional experiences with fatigue of inexperienced human service professionals

Abstract

The present research aimed to clarify what kind of emotions inexperienced human service professionals felt when exhausted, and also what the structure of these emotions was. To this end, the research used the Japanese Burnout Scale and also semi-structured interviews, through which data on burnout conditions and current states, as well as on fatigue experiences as described in the interviewees’ diaries were collected. Using qualitative analysis, the auther formulated two pillars, namely (a) “object”, i.e. towards what the interviewees feel exhaustion, and (b) “negative emotions”, i.e. what kind of negative emotions the interviewees experience. Out of the two pillars, the auther derived 11 categories, six of which refer to “object” and five–to “negative emotions”. Additionally, the cross tabulation revealed that the “negative emotions” categories didn’t correspond directly to that of “object”, thus their combination diversity represented the diversity of fatigue experience; and the number of applicable categories revealed that the tendency of experiencing “negative emotions” differed to each subject.