Understanding Emotions in Caring Work: Combining and Developing Theory Using Three Empirical Cases

Abstract

Caring as a type of paid work can be emotionally exhausting, especially when care recipients present complex medical and non-medical problems. Extant theories of the consequences of emotionally exhausting work-developed by social scientists and practitioners-have been critiqued on methodological, theoretical, and practical grounds. This article suggests combining extant theories to incorporate individual, interactional, and organizational level factors that may be emotionally exhausting, but may also provide motivational resources for doing the work. Using semi-structured interview data from 60 workers from three different cases of emotionally intensive care work, this article provides case studies that link individual, interactional, and organizational processes to emotional experiences at work. I find that positive and negative emotional experiences result from interactions with care recipients, co-workers, work structures, and workers’ sense of self. I then quantify interview data and analyze patterns through correspondence analysis, a technique that decomposes correlations between categorical variables to identify underlying dimensions within the data. Underlying dimensions permit the development of new hypotheses that link patients’ life stage and organizational resistance to emotional experiences within caring work. This article argues that the combination of theories has stronger theoretical, methodological, and practical value than extant approaches.