Youth working on the helpline: Personality characteristics

Abstract

Some categories of people have to often communicate with others as part of their job and no less often is this communication stressful. An illustrative example are people working on the helpline. There is a range of relevant issues facing young professionals working on helplines in the human-to-human mode that requires a detailed analysis. Among them are the following: how long an individual can interact in this environment; how it impacts an individual; what personality characteristics ensure effective coping with professional stress. Personality characteristics can be considered a source of an individual’s inner strength. It facilitates coping with nonstandard situations and stress factors and encourages the understanding of emergent problems and effective decisionmaking. The article repots the results of a study that explored personality characteristics of youth working on the helpline. The study focused on young people aged from 18 to 25 years. This group included those working and not working on the helpline. Another group included professionals aged from 26 to 50 years. The total sample size was 80 people with 42 professional psychologists and 38 psychology students. The study used the following methods: a self-designed questionnaire Assessment of Professional Satisfaction with Work; BFI-2 (Big Five Inventory-2); Subjective Well-Being Scale by A. Perue-Badu (adapted by V. M. Sokolova); a stress diagnostic tool (A. O. Prokhorov); and Hall Emotional Intelligence Test. It was found that psychology students working on helplines have higher values of emotional intelligence index and more pronounced values for the subscales ‘trust’ and ‘empathy’ than their nonworking counterparts. Besides, as compared to older colleagues, young psychologists have higher values for the subscales ‘depressiveness’ and ‘empathy’ and lower values for the subscales reflecting the degree of one’s immersion into one’s inner world and degree of satisfaction with daily activities. The study identified and described significant connections between personality characteristics in the general sample as well as its age-based subsamples. In particular, the study established the interrelations between personal benevolence and emotional intelligence (N=42) (r=0.41 at p≤0.05) / subjective well-being (r=-0.43 at p≤0.05). The subsample of young professionals revealed the correlations between indicators of negative emotionality and benevolence (r=-0.55 at p≤0.05) / perseverance (r=-0.47 at p≤0.05). The older subsample showed the relationship between the indicators of benevolence and conscientiousness (r= 0.70 at p≤0.05).