Work Description

Date: 05 March, 2024

Dataset Title: Dataset Professional Quality of Life and Compassion Fatigue Survey in Research Animal Personnel

Dataset Creators: L.E. Young, F. Ferrara, L. Kelly, T.L. Martin, S. Thompson-Iritani & M.R. LaFollette

Dataset Contact: Tara Martin taramar@umich.edu

Funding: The 3Rs Collaborative received a grant from the Northwest Center for Occupational Health & Safety: Professional Training Opportunities Program to help create and distribute this survey and analyze this survey data.

Key Points:
- We survey people working in the laboratory animal setting on their professional quality of life and compassion fatigue.
- We ask about professional quality of life metrics like burnout, secondary traumatic stress and compassion satisfaction.
- We ask about workplace metrics like job satisfaction and job retention.
- We also ask about knowledge and levels of compassion fatigue and factors that make compassion fatigue better or worse.

Research Overview:
Working with research animals can be both rewarding and challenging. The rewarding part of the work is associated with understanding the necessity for animal research to improve the health of humans and animals and the knowledge that one can provide care and compassion for the animals. Challenges with animal research include witnessing stress/pain in animals necessitated by scientific requirements, end-of-study euthanasia, and societal stigmatization about animal research. These challenges could be compounded with more general workplace stresses, in turn, impacting job retention and satisfaction. However, these factors have yet to be formally evaluated. Therefore, the purpose of this survey was to comprehensively evaluate professional quality of life’s correlation with key workplace metrics. This manuscript reports baseline survey metrics from 198 participants from six institutions recruited to participate in a compassion fatigue resiliency program. The survey aimed to evaluate professional quality of life, job satisfaction, retention, and factors influencing compassion fatigue resiliency. Personnel who reported higher compassion satisfaction also reported higher retention and job satisfaction. Conversely, personnel who reported higher burnout also reported lower job satisfaction. Participants said their compassion fatigue was most often impacted by institutional culture, and also animal research, general mental health and compassion fatigue specific support.

Methodology:
The data are from a cross-sectional survey of research personnel administered via Qualtrics. Participants answered 30-32 questions, depending on whether they work hands-on or hands-off with research animals. Participants were recruited via direct emails to the six institutions participating in the longitudinal interventional trial.

Instrument and/or Software specifications: Qualtrics

Files contained here:
The attached file shows the anonymized results of our compassion fatigue resiliency survey. Metadata is included that describes each question asked.

Related publication(s):
Young L.E., Ferrara F., Kelly L., Martin T.L., Thompson-Iritani S., LaFollette M.R. Professional quality of life in animal research personnel is linked to retention & job satisfaction: A mixed-methods cross-sectional survey on compassion fatigue in the USA. PLOS ONE. 2024. In Press.

Use and Access:
This data set is made available under an Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0): This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit the authors for the original creation.

To Cite Data:
Martin, T.L. Dataset Professional Quality of Life and Compassion Fatigue Survey in Research Animal Personnel [Data set], University of Michigan - Deep Blue Data. https://doi.org/10.7302/cdpa-qp43