"All Day, Every Day, Listening to Trauma": Investigating Features of Digital Interventions for Empathy-Based Stress and Burnout

Abstract

Frontline workers (FLWs) in gender-based violence (GBV) service provision regularly engage in intense emotional labor to provide survivors of GBV with essential, often life-saving, services. However, FLWs experience intense burnout, resulting in turnover rates as high as 50% annually and a critical loss of services for survivors. In order to design digital burnout interventions in a context where so few exist, we recruited 15 FLWs for a 3-stage qualitative study where they used two existing applications to reflect on, and reimagine, concrete design features necessary to address FLW burnout in GBV service provision. We contribute important findings regarding designing specifically for empathy-based stress (EBS) in frontline work contexts, preferences for activities, desired interactivity, among other requirements for interventions. We synthesize our design recommendations through an example scenario of a collaborative just-in-time adaptive intervention (co-JITAI) system that integrates peer-based support that can adapt to users' changing needs and contexts over time.

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