Carrie Leana (University of Pittsburgh), a member of RSF’s working group on care work and contributor to the RSF book For Love and Money, has co-authored a new working paper drawing from research supported by the Foundation. In the study, Leana and colleagues Jirs Meuris and Cait Lamberton look at how empathy affects turnover and patient safety among nursing aides who care for the elderly. What does it mean to perform caregiving job with empathy, and how does empathy affect the outcomes of both those who receive care and those who provide it? The abstract states:

In this paper we use inductive and deductive methods to explore the role of empathy in caregiving jobs: Specifically, the relationship between empathetic care, patient safety and employee turnover. We argue that empathetic care is evidenced by extra-role behavior, emotional engagement, and relational richness between paid caregivers and clients. We develop our model using qualitative interviews with paid caregivers, and test it using quantitative case studies in six skilled nursing facilities. We find that empathetic care predicts patient safety but not employee turnover. Moreover, we find that job and life circumstances moderate the relationship between empathetic care and safety. Specifically, patient load, overtime work, and financial hardship dampen the otherwise positive relationship between empathetic care and safety. We find some evidence of a moderating effect of employee self-efficacy in influencing the relationship between empathetic care and turnover. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of care jobs.

RSF’s working group on care work was formed in 2009 to study the social organization of care work in the United States and tackle the difficult policy problems that arise from the fact that market care is not a perfect substitute for family care. Drawing on diverse disciplines, areas of expertise, and methodological orientations, the working group has developed an innovative research agenda that provides a theoretically unified and empirically substantive analysis of care provision in the United States. Many of their findings were published in the volume For Love and Money (2012), edited by Nancy Folbre.

Click here to download the new working paper in full.