Blaming the victim: A qualitative study on mobbing experiences of assistant practitioners

With the acceleration of industrialization, mobbing has begun to be scrutinized more in academic publications. In the literature, mobbing has been investigated quantitatively by many different researchers and detailed statistics have been obtained both in industry and in the health sector. The studies involving assistant physicians who are in the first years of their profession are both small in number and quantitative. In these studies where the depression and burnout scale was applied, quantitative data was obtained, but since the in-depth interview method was not used, the personal comments of the assistant physicians about their experiences could not be obtained yet. In light of this information, it is apparent that there is a lack of qualitative research on both the health sector habitus and the personal experiences of assistant physicians. The aim of this research will be to explore social balances by shedding light on the mobbing experiences of assistant physicians, who may be considered new to their profession, in the environment where they start working, and to raise awareness by bringing up mobbing experiences in the health sector while interpreting how these balances work. The elements that create social balances can be shown as hospital habitus, mobbing, by whom mobbing is applied to whom, who is seen as the culprit of this action from the victimology perspective, and the psychological and sociological changes that occur after victimization. In the light of the qualitative findings obtained as a result of the research, the common mobbing models encountered by assistant physicians, the reactions and psychological effects given according to these models, the lack of support from the environment and the institutes despite being a victim of mobbing, and even being blamed for being a victim in some cases, will be analyzed. One of the final results of the research is to make a personal or systematic suggestion that will bring these variables together in a single pot.