Publication Date
2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Committee Members
Debra Steele-Johnson, Ph.D. (Committee Chair); David LaHuis, Ph.D. (Committee Member); Valerie Shalin, Ph.D. (Committee Member); Scott Watamaniuk, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the stress endured by those in caring professions and emphasized the impact that compassion fatigue and burnout have on helping professionals’ well-being and retention (J. Huang et al., 2024; Volk et al., 2022). However, researchers often have failed to adequately distinguish between compassion fatigue and burnout (e.g. Boyle, 2011). Additionally, researchers have overlooked the animal welfare community (e.g., Figley & Roop, 2006) in favor of focusing on human healthcare workers. Thus, the purposes of my study were to 1) examine whether emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue were related but distinct phenomena and 2) propose and examine a model of compassion fatigue with antecedents, outcomes, and moderators in the animal welfare community. Participants (N = 132) completed a survey that contained demographic questions as well as measures of workload, resilience, exposure to secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, burnout, turnover intention, subjective well-being, guilt, and learned helplessness. I found that emotional exhaustion and compassion fatigue loaded onto distinct factors. Additionally, I found adequate model fit for my proposed model of compassion fatigue in the animal welfare community. My results raised issues related to the measurement of compassion fatigue and emotional exhaustion, the validity of my model across different contexts, and resilience as a moderator for compassion fatigue. Future researchers should focus on developing better quality measures of compassion fatigue and burnout, validating the proposed model across multiple different contexts and populations, and exploring potential moderators for exposure to secondary trauma and compassion fatigue.
Page Count
165
Department or Program
Department of Psychology
Year Degree Awarded
2025
Copyright
Copyright 2025, all rights reserved. My ETD will be available under the "Fair Use" terms of copyright law.
