The story of my evolution as a practice-based collaborative researcher is a story that comes full circle. Through exploring my own experiences of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma as a hospital-based social worker, I am able to investigate the phenomenon across the profession and provide a critique of the needs of practitioners working in the complex environment of hospitals and health care. Parallel to this is an investigation into the need for practice research in this complex environment and in the profession overall as seen through the lens of a collaborative research partnership with social work hospital colleagues that transformed my approach to research. I have drawn on personal narrative, autoethnography and reflexive processing to investigate my own impact on and from this research. I conclude with an understanding of the power of storytelling in participatory action research and in the potential in collaborative research methodologies for authentic reciprocity and relationship to traverse the practice–research divide.
By embedding narrative theory within the practice of storied forms, there can be pedagogical movement from difficulty to insight. This piece explores scholarly personal narrative as a creative and critical method for attaining academic understanding. The ideas of three narrative scholars (Nash, Fowler, and Luce-Kapler) surface within two writing forms—a letter and a poem. The author playfully reports on the powerful processes that are engaged when shared creative story forms become part of teaching, learning, and writing.
This scholarly personal narrative (Nash 2004) draws on the author’s experiences as a woman in a male-dominated gaming community. In such a space, being a woman who plays the game problematizes notions of gender for both the author and for her most-often male opponents. When playing the game, she operates in a liminal space between expert and outsider because of her gender identity. At the same time, her gender troubles her men opponents. She discusses her struggles for acceptance in this community and how her notions and enactment of gender have changed as a result of her experiences. In the article, the author explains the social norms of the game and the demographic breakdown of the game’s players; to accomplish this, the author shares stories from her time as a player.
Through this scholarly personal narrative, the author offers insight into how student creativity can be engaged or neglected. While the narrative highlights the potential conflict between students’ lives and their schools, the hope lies in the illuminative power of stories of difficulty. By interweaving narrative and theory, the author sheds light on the conditions that inhibit creativity, and emphasizes the capacity of teachers to locate creative, compassionate spaces for themselves and their students.
The social work profession began in the early 1900s and has changed and evolved in many ways since then. The author raises the question: ‘Am I who the founding mothers of social work imagined when they began their work?’ Looking at the values of the profession with a focus on social justice and language, the author explores how she is working towards social justice and how it fits into the historical perspective of the profession.
Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Trauma in Everyday Hospital Social Work: A Personal Narrative of Practitioner–Researcher Identity Transition
