‘It Feels We’Re Invisible’: Emotions of Early-Career Social Workers Engaged with at-Risk Youth In Wartime: An Ecological Mapping

Background and Purpose:
Emotions are a central component of social work practice, shaping professional relationships, decision-making, and intervention processes. However, limited research has examined the emotional experiences of early-career social workers, particularly in contexts of shared traumatic reality (STR). This study explores the emotional experiences of early-career social workers working with at-risk youth during wartime, focusing on how these emotions are embedded in everyday practice. The study addresses the research question: How do early-career social workers experience and construct emotions within their practice during wartime, and how are these experiences shaped across ecological contexts?

Methods:
The study employed a qualitative research design. Data were collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 19 early-career social workers working with at-risk youth. Participants were recruited using purposive sampling. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using thematic analysis. An ecological framework was applied to map emotional experiences across personal, organizational, and societal contexts, resulting in an “ecological emotion map” that enabled a multi-level understanding of emotional processes in practice.

Results:
Findings indicate that emotional experiences are deeply embedded in social work practice in wartime contexts and function as a multi-level mechanism shaping professional functioning and sustainability. Participants reported a complex emotional landscape, including professional satisfaction and commitment, alongside guilt, helplessness, and fear, which influenced their engagement with youth and their sense of professional efficacy. Wartime conditions intensified emotional demands across all contexts.

At the organizational level, participants described loneliness, insufficient supervision, lack of structured emotional processing, and high workload demands, contributing to emotional exhaustion and considerations of leaving the profession. At the societal level, participants reported low professional recognition and inadequate compensation, alongside a strong sense of meaning and commitment to their role. Across all contexts, a persistent sense of invisibility emerged, reflecting the gap between emotional demands and institutional recognition.

The ecological emotion mapping offers a novel analytic framework for understanding how emotional processes operate across practice contexts in social work and how they shape workforce sustainability over time.

Conclusions and Implications:
The findings highlight emotional labor as a core dimension of social work practice in contexts of shared trauma. The study underscores the need to integrate trauma-informed, reflective supervision practices that include structured emotional debriefing, as well as organizational policies that address workload pressures and emotional demands. At the policy level, strengthening institutional recognition of emotional labor is essential to improve retention and support workforce sustainability among early-career social workers in high-stress contexts.

Keywords: social work practice; emotional labor; early-career social workers; at-risk youth; shared traumatic reality.