Abstract

South Korea introduced a compulsory long-term care insurance in July 2008. The aim of the research is to understand the reasons of turnover of care workers. The research question of the study is ‘Why do care workers are likely to move to other service providing organizations or resign their jobs?

To explore the issue, the author conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 care workers in South Korea.

The care workers actively reported their experiences of the provision of services in the field. The interview participants not only shared their own intention of turnover, but they also frequently reported the experiences of other colleague care workers who moved to other organizations or resigned their jobs altogether. Overall, it was found that the turnover of care workers is related with a number of inter-related factors. Namely, the turnover issues are related with not only the macro level factors such as social perception on care workers, but also the meso level factors such as organizational management and the micro level factors such as the relationships with care workers and other people.