The Emotional Labor of Personal Grief in Palliative Care: Balancing caring and professional identities
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Date
2018
Authors
Funk, Laura M.
Peters, Sheryl
Roger, Kerstin Steiber
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Sage Journals (Qualitative Health Research)
Abstract
The paid provision of care for dying persons and their families blends commodified emotion work and attachments to two often-conflicting role identities: the caring person and the professional. We explore how health care employees interpret personal grief related to patient death, drawing on interviews with twelve health care aides and thirteen nurses. Data were analyzed collaboratively using an interpretively embedded thematic coding approach and constant comparison. Participant accounts of preventing, postponing, suppressing and coping with grief revealed implicit meanings about the nature of grief and the appropriateness of grief display. Employees often struggled to find the time and space to deal with grief, and faced normative constraints on grief expression at work. Findings illustrate the complex ways health care employees negotiate and maintain both caring and professional identities in the context of cultural and material constraints. Implications of emotional labor for discourse and practice in health care settings are discussed.
Description
Keywords
emotional labour; grief and bereavement; paid care work; feeling rules
Citation
Funk, L.M., Peters, S., & Roger, K.S. (2018). Caring about dying persons and their families: Interpretation, practice and emotional labour. Health and Social Care in the Community, 26(4), 519–26.