Violence within the organizations of health and medico-social sector. A comparative analysis of France and Romania

Violence at work is a social problem at internationally level and according to the WHO (2002) is a global challenge. In the health and medico-social sector, there are more and more strongly political, institutional and professional preoccupations. This is the case in France and Romania. However, the figures that cover this phenomenon in each of these two countries are they identical? Thus a comparison we envision. The purpose of this communication is to lay the theoretical and methodological framework of the comparison, stating the segments studied, after identifying possible national peculiarities in the way of understanding the violence in the health and medico-social sector. To avoid falling into the trap of ethnocentrism, we choose to build a definition of violence from we start, not predefined categories, but the experience of the individual, in this case, healthcare workers, which will be the focus of this comparative research. The thesis will be tested as follows: the experience of violence for health professionals is related to the specificities of the organization (which requires social work reports) and the service relationship (which leads to analyze relations between users and professionals) whose transformations are specific to each national context. To understand the experience of healthcare workers and in coherence with the epistemological approach taken, we shall realize a victimization survey asking respondents what they are experiencing as violence in the exercise of their profession. Violence will be analyzed, not in a decontextualized manner of pre-defined categories, but from the qualifications made by the respondents. The data analysis will us allow to characterize the figures of violence in each of these national contexts and identify, if any, social regularities similar in both countries.