Department heading

Project management: Prof. Dr Gamze Güzel-Freudenstein, Prof. Dr Margit Christiansen

Collaborator: M.Sc. Anja Bergmann

Duration: 1.4.2018 until 31.12.2018

Funded by:Hessian Ministry of Science and Art

Men and women differ in the context of violence in their openness to injury and their capacity to injure (cf. Popitz 1986; Wobbe 1994:177-207). So far, little research has been done on how this gender asymmetry plays out in workplace violence. Especially when the violence is not inflicted by colleagues but by the client, there is still a research desideratum.

A particularly vulnerable area is emergency rooms in hospitals, where employees may be exposed to violence by patients and their relatives. Therefore, in this project, violent situations in emergency rooms are to be recorded and, within the framework of a gender-sensitive consideration in the assessment of risk, it is to be researched whether violence in emergency rooms is reported more frequently by men or by women and who the perpetrators are. In addition, it will be analysed whether the attitudes and coping strategies of men and women differ with regard to physical and psychological stress. Thus, it is to be examined whether the thesis of gender differences in the openness to injury and the power to injure is confirmed here and whether gender-related needs result from this, from which initial recommendations for measures of relationship and behavioural prevention for the work area "emergency room" can be derived.

On the basis of a systematic literature search in the databases PsycINFO, CINAHL, EMBASE, MEDLINE, Econlit, BEFO Betriebsführung und -organisation, WISO and Web of Science as well as on relevant internet sites and freely available on the net, the state of knowledge about experiences of violence at the workplace and characteristics of the perception of violence is processed, in which the results are evaluated in a gender-specific manner. Indicators that record characteristics of the perception of violence are extracted and the state of knowledge on the evaluation of prevention and intervention measures is processed.

An online survey is planned in order to record the violence situation in emergency departments in Hesse as broadly as possible. The basic population is to be limited to employees of emergency departments. Access to this field will be created by writing to the medical directors of hospitals with emergency departments with information about the project and the request to inform the employees in the emergency department about the survey and the associated link to the survey. For the development of the questionnaire, the knowledge gained in the systematic literature research will be used, e.g. by analysing already used and validated questionnaires, e.g. Staff Oberservation of Aggression Scale-Revised (SOAS-R) by Nijman et al. (cf. Nijman et al. 1999: 197 ff) and adapting it with regard to the research questions. In addition, the questionnaire developed will be pretested with regard to the comprehensibility of the questions and the quality of the scales used in order to ensure validity.