Exploring Research Trends on Emotional Labor in Social Welfare Using Keyword Networks

Exploring Research Trends on Emotional Labor in Social Welfare Using Keyword Networks

(Propose) Social welfare workers tend to view emotional labor as their vocational obligation and a personal matter, compared with people in other service-providing organizations. Therefore, they are not inclined to accept emotional labor as a form of actual labor, and this exacerbates their serious situation related to emotional labor. There is a need to specifically identify and discuss trends in research on emotional labor. And it is possible to grasp trends of research on emotional labor in the field of social welfare by using network analysis. (Design/methodology/approach) This study carries out keyword network analysis using the NetMiner program. The keyword network analysis extracts meaningful keywords from collected literature data, identifies the co-occurrence frequency of keywords, and analyzes similarity between keywords in this frequency. This study also carries out degree centrality and betweenness centrality analyses to understand the mediating role of a specific keyword in the related network. Further, a spring map is presented to identify adjacent keywords. (Findings) First, as for research on emotional labor in the field of social welfare, three articles were published in 2010, and 16 articles of the highest frequency were published in 2019 and 2020. From 2010 to 2023, nine articles on the topic were published annually on average. Second, from 2010 to 2023, a keyword showing the highest occurrence frequency in South Korea with respect to emotional labor in the field of social welfare was duty, followed by burnout, stress, service, and satisfaction. These findings confirm that studies on emotional labor conducted in the field of social welfare in South Korea were mainly about burnout, stress and satisfaction. Third, a keyword showing the highest degree of centrality was duty, followed by burnout, stress, organization, satisfaction, and service, and this indicates that various studies were conducted on emotional labor in the field of social welfare. (Research implications or Originality) Emotional labor in the field of social welfare requires more emotional input than in other fields of emotional labor. It was found that studies on emotional labor in the field of social welfare had decreased since the expansion of COVID-19, but research on emotional labor will have to be continued consistently to identify and investigate the phenomena of emotional labor among social workers that will be put again into the field of social welfare according as COVID-19 becomes endemic. Particularly, emotional labor shows high correlations with the keywords of job, stress, satisfaction, and burn-out; and it is predicted this phenomenon will occur steadily in the future together with social workers’ emotional labor.