Client Violence in Social Work Practice: Conflict Styles of Victims

Soňa Lovašová

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Client Violence in Social Work Practice: Conflict Styles of Victims

Soňa Lovašová

Medailon autora:

Mgr. Soňa Lovašová, PhD. Works at the Department of Social Work of the Faculty of Arts at Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice and currently holds the position of Assistant Professor. Her research focuses on client violence towards social workers and deals with stressful situations and meaning of life of the unemployed. She has been working as a social advisor in the sphere of distance consultation services.

Abstrakt:

This study deals with incidents of client violence and their connection to the conflict styles of the victims. It lists the most important findings in the areas of client violence in social work practice. The research is based on a survey and its objective was to detect the incidences of individual client violence cases and their possible connection to the conflict styles of the victims. 315 respondents to the study were from the Office of Labour, Social Affairs and Family, the employees of crisis centres, re-socialisation centres and foster homes. The survey results showed a high incidence of verbal abuse. On the other hand, the study did not confirm any connection between a conflict attitude of the victims and the incidence of client violence. The respondents used mainly collaborating as a conflict style; men opt for competing as a conflict style more often than women and the respondents reached higher scores in the cooperativeness indexes than in the assertiveness indexes.