Research Information System
23. Uluslararası Psikolojik Danışma ve Rehberlik Kongresi, İstanbul, Turkey, 13 - 15 June 2022, pp.43-45
Purpose: The main aim of career counselling is to help individuals become productive and healthy members of society by working in meaningful and decent jobs now and in the future. Job and career are important factors that contribute to an individual's psychological wellbeing.Similarly, many theorists in psychology highlight the importance of having a job for the mental and physical health of individuals. However, individuals can face unwanted situations threatening their psychological well-being, such as mobbing, nepotism, excessive workload, and unhealthy work relationships in their workplace. This dark side of career seems to be an important issue that needs to be examined and investigated in today's world where change and transformation happen very fast, job descriptions change or disappear, economic problems increase with the pandemic and competition gets stronger. In this regard, social media platforms have an important function for individuals to express their voices without revealing their identity. Therefore, it can be claimed that social media content analysis, which has become widespread recently, helps researchers to understand the dark side of their career by benefiting from this function of social media. The current study aims to understand the dark side of the career by analyzing posts about working life on the social media platform Ekşi Sözlük.
Method: In this study, content analysis was utilized to analyse posts regarding "working life" in Eksi Sözlük. Firstly, 2046 posts were taken in Eksi Sözlük. One of the authors quickly reviewed all posts and excluded those that had insufficient content and were irrelevant to the research aims, such as those containing only links. 1930 posts were selected in this process for forward analysis. Secondly, 10% of the whole data set was selected randomly (200 posts) and coded into categories and themes by the author. Holistic, descriptive, and value coding methods were used for analysis. The code list obtained in this process was reviewed and controlled by other authors. Thus, the code list agreed upon by all authors was obtained. The rest of the posts were coded according to the code list. In case the new category is needed, consensus among the authors is reached by taking other authors’ opinions into consideration. Other authors re-coded the posts, which were randomly selected to compose 10% of all posts (200 posts). The Kappa coefficient was calculated to assess intercoder consistency. All the authors discussed reaching consensus in the case of consistency.
Results: As a result of the analysis of Ekşi Sözlük posts, findings about business life itself,
work relationships, relationships with managers, and individual factors were obtained. The
post contained issues such as insecurity in work relationships, excessive competition and
insufficient cooperation, loneliness, injustice, discrimination, mobbing, problems with
managers, etc. The study's most striking findings, on the other hand, were related to the
meaning of working in posts. Negative attitudes towards business life were highlighted in the
posts as well as the other issues such as establishing work-life balance and disliking the job
they currently have. In this regard, topics such as monotony of life, excessive working hours,
and excessive workload were obtained.
Conclusion: The importance of career counselling in terms of working life quality and job
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satisfaction was inferred in the conclusion of this study. Individuals can not only have
difficulty due to the obstacles they face in the workplace, but they can also have a negative
attitude towards the work itself. Therefore, working can be a risk factor, contrarily it is
expected to improve wellbeing. In this regard, posts have intense emotions such as
hopelessness, anger, rebellion, and sadness. The findings claimed that career counselling is
required for not only educational institutions but also workplaces because of the improved
working lives of people. The implications and recommendations were presented in the context
of education and employment.