scholarly journals Self-efficacy and humanitarian aid workers

Author(s):  
Christine R. Turner ◽  
Donald Bosch ◽  
Anne A. T. Nolty

AbstractAs a result of frequent exposure to trauma, aid workers are at high risk for negative psychological symptoms. Training specifically geared at fostering critical incident self-efficacy in humanitarian aid workers may bolster critical incident self-efficacy as well as general self-efficacy as they relate to experiences of traumatic symptomatology and resilience. Sixty-three aid workers completed questionnaires regarding efficacy, resilience, coping, and posttraumatic stress symptomatology at baseline, and 46 aid workers completed the same measures after the training workshop. Multiple regression analysis indicated that higher levels of self-efficacy related to higher resilience levels. General self-efficacy and critical incident coping self-efficacy (CICSE) were stronger after the training, even when controlling for histories of trauma. Histories of trauma contributed significant variance to CICSE before the training but were insignificant after the training. These findings suggest that aid organizations can support their workers by providing training that promotes resilience through enhancing efficacies.

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 650-655
Author(s):  
Liza Jachens

Set in challenging and complex environments, there has been growing concern about the mental health consequences of aid work. Along with existing difficulties in reducing well-known occupational risks such as exposure to trauma, there is a lack of awareness of psychosocial risks in the humanitarian sector. This paper is a discussion, drawing on occupational health perspectives, on ways to reflect on mental health policies, research and interventions in this sector.


2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynette H. Bikos ◽  
Michael Klemens ◽  
Leigh Randa ◽  
Alyson Barry ◽  
Thomas Bore

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1191-1213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miranda Visser ◽  
Melinda Mills ◽  
Liesbet Heyse ◽  
Rafael Wittek ◽  
Vincenzo Bollettino

A limited body of research has examined satisfaction with work–life balance of expatriate workers who live abroad, residing outside the typical “family” or “life” domain. This study aims to demonstrate how and under which organizational circumstances job autonomy can increase work–life balance satisfaction of humanitarian aid expatriates. We hypothesize that especially in humanitarian work, trust in management can buffer potential negative effects of high autonomy. We test our hypothesis by means of ordinal logistic regression, using survey data collected among expatriates of the Operational Center Amsterdam of Médecins Sans Frontières ( N = 142). Results reveal that high levels of autonomy are positively related with work–life balance satisfaction when trust in the management of the organization is high. When trust in management is low, the effect of high autonomy on work–life balance satisfaction is negative. This implies that trust in management indeed buffers negative effects of high autonomy among expatriate humanitarian aid workers.


Author(s):  
Emizet F. Kisangani ◽  
David F. Mitchell

Abstract Since the end of the Cold War, the UN has extended many of its missions in conflict zones to include political, military, and humanitarian activities. Many humanitarian nongovernmental organizations have been critical of these “integrated” UN missions, claiming that they can blur the distinction between political, military, and humanitarian action, thus placing humanitarian aid workers at risk of retaliation from warring factions opposed to the UN’s political objectives. This proposition is empirically tested using generalized methods of moments statistical analysis of sixty-seven countries that experienced intrastate conflict between 1997 and 2018. When assessing attacks in general—to include the sum of aid workers killed, wounded, and kidnapped—the results indicate that humanitarian aid workers are more likely to come under attack in countries that have an integrated UN mission. However, when the attacks are assessed separately, results show that this relationship holds only with aid workers who are killed in the field.


Pragmatics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-300
Author(s):  
Kevin McKenzie

Abstract This paper is concerned with the way that laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation in talk among humanitarian aid workers as they describe their professional activities in settings of armed conflict. I first set out to situate my analysis within the tradition of work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM), exploring how that approach differs in significant ways from work in pragmatics and related traditions of discourse analytic research. Unlike the latter approaches, EM examines laughter for the intelligibility it is deployed by speakers to furnish, so that the presumption of laughter’s revelatory nature which characterizes a pragmatically-oriented analysis is seen as a participant resource for rendering the situated significance of actions visible by and for the involved parties of a given episode of interaction. Following this, I examine talk from open-ended interviews with aid agency operatives who work in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, exploring how laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation where the potential accusation of opportunism arises in accounts of personal job satisfaction as against the legitimacy otherwise afforded with an appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice. Where speakers attend to the criticism of humanitarian activity for its significance in affecting outcomes of warfare, the management of these different demands is accomplished in reflexive work to ironize their own and others’ formulations of motivation for pursuing humanitarian work.


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannele Haggman ◽  
Joyce Kenkre ◽  
Carolyn Wallace

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