School Related Burnout and Students' Coping Strategies
Author(s):
Nora Kunos (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2017
Network:
Emerging Researchers' Group (for presentation at Emerging Researchers' Conference)
Format:
Paper

Session Information

ERG SES C 05, Learning and Education

Time:
2017-08-21
11:00-12:30
Room:
W2.10
Chair:
Meinert Arnd Meyer

Contribution

School-related burnout has been a widely known phenomenon since Salmela-Aro confirmed its existence among Finnish high school students (Salmela-Aro & Näätänen, 2006). Several research groups are interested in its occurrence  all over the world (Walburg, 2014) and try to explore reasons, background factors, personal and environmental effects of school-related burnout. The aim of our research is to map out the population at risk by a representative survey among Hungarian high school students and identify stages of burnout according to Freudenberger’s model (Freudenberger & North, 1992) by document analysis of students’ school career-stories and interviews. We prove presence of this problem with all its symptoms like being exhausted from school demands, cynicism to school-work and feeling inefficient at school (Salmela-Aro, Kiuru, Pietikainen, & Jokela, 2008) and point out that half of our students suffer at least from one of the three symptoms and 15 % of students can be identified as totally burnt-out (Kunos, 2015). Based on the European literature from Lithuania (Raiziene, Pilkauskaite-Valickiene, & Zukauskiene, 2014), Sweden and Norway (Schraml, 2013), Finland (Salmela Aro et al. 2008) we depict a picture of school-related burnout researches in Europe and compare outcomes with Asian and American results (Jelas, et al., 2014) (Tan & Yao, 2012) (Çakıra et al, 2014) as well.

Our research has a new dimension which can confirm our interest in teachers’ role in prevention and therapy of students’ burnout: we suppose there is a strong relation between teachers’ and students’ burnout. We focus on the students’ perception of teachers’ burnout, and presume that the more the students sense their teachers bunt-out, the more they feel their own problems. We have data from previous researches about correlations between these two phenomena (Kunos, 2015) and take it as a starting point. In this research we suppose the opposite option: the more the students feel their teachers enthusiastic, caring and successful, the more they can form their own coping strategies.

Mapping main reasons of school burnout we set up the following research questions:

  1. Can we identify background factors of burnout and draw conclusions in general?
  2. Can we classify symptoms based on the 12-stage model?
  3. Can we explore how students manage their problems and develop own coping strategies to fight against burnout?

Our hypotheses were:

H1: School well-being, satisfaction with school support and school result help students to avoid burnout: the better they feel at school, the less they suffer from burnout

H2: Students can exactly point out their problems at school and identify them as reasons of exhaustion, cynicism and inefficiency – symptoms of burnout syndrome

H3: There are typical strategies to avoid school problems and these coping strategies can be classified as solutions brought from home, acquired in peer groups and taught by teachers at school

We stepped back to Freudenberger’s 12 stages of burnout to learn more about the nature of its development. We strongly believe it is quite a long process from the first stage as working hard through the stages of neglecting own needs, have psychosomatic symptoms and panic attacks until the last stage as totally burnout. These stages can be clearly drawn and interpreted by students as it has been proved by our former research presented on 2016 ECER in Dublin (Lanszki & Kunos, 2016).  In our actual research we identify these stages as phases of school-related burnout using students’ school- career documents and make it visible how teachers can intervene in process if they have tools to realize it.

Method

We use mixed methods with systematic triangulation of perspectives. We approach the problem of school-related burnout from different distances: starting with international studies, we identify mutual outcomes and examine them in the Hungarian population. We have data from a pilot research in 2015 ( (Kunos, 2015) and at the time of the conference we will have data from a representative research among about 4000 Hungarian high school students and will present conclusions and results. We use Salmela Aro’s School Burnout Inventory (Salmela-Aro K. , Kiuru, Leskinen, & Nurmi, 2009), adapted in Hungary by presenter, and SPSS 21 to work with. Quantitative researches have already pointed out main background factors of school-related burnout such as well-being at school, satisfaction with school results and school supports etc., and using them as a starting point we compiled a guideline for interviews with students suffered from burnout syndrome to establish our hypotheses. We used focus groups to collect data about possible reasons of problems, evidences about students’ competences to realize these reasons and to develop adequate strategies to cope with them. Recently we have collected 3 focus group interviews’ records from three different schools and will have about 10 until the presentation of our research. We will continue our research with working up app. 150 students’ school-career stories. Last grade students were asked to remember their school years from stepping into the first class until the final exams. They also got a guideline how to build the draft, we also asked them to touch upon transitions from elementary school to upper schools, family’s, school’s, teachers’ and classmates’ role in managing with challenges at school and general feeling and its changes during the school years. To analyse focus group interviews’ records and students’ stories we use MAXQDA and methodology of systematic triangulation (Sántha, 2015).

Expected Outcomes

We have lots of evidence for existence of burnout syndrome among high school students – with our quantitative and qualitative research in mixed method we can strengthen former data and place it into a wider perspective as talking not only about reasons but students’ expectations about coping with it as well. Referring students’ school career stories and outcomes of focus group interviews to Freudenberger’s 12-stage model of burnout we can learn that students are totally aware of their own symptoms, leading to burnout syndrome, but most of them cannot explore suitable strategies to cope with challenges. On the other hand, it became clear that they can accept help from several people and organizations and identify its usefulness. Based on about 150 school career-stories and interviews we have found evidences to strengthen all our hypotheses: school well-being in general is a very important factor to prevent school-related burnout (H1); all the three symptoms of burnout syndrome are very promptly identified by students as exhausting, cynicism and feeling inefficiency (H2); we could map and classify typical avoiding and coping strategies (H3). But our images about teachers’ role in prevention and therapy must be more thoroughly examined: the majority of students named friends and classmates instead of teachers as helpers of successful coping. In stories of students suffered from burnout we can name Freudenberger’s stages of burnout so the outcome of our research became an opportunity to teach teachers to identify and help students to identify signs of risk and start coping with problems in time.

References

Çakıra, S., Akçab, F., Kodazc, A. F., & Tulgarerd, S. (2014). The Survey of Academic Procrastionation on High School Students with in Terms of School Burn-Out and Learning Styles. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 114 ( 2014 ) 654 – 662, 654-662. Freudenberger, H., & North, G. (1992). Burnout bei Frauen. Frankfurt am Main: Krüger. Jelas, Z. M., Salleh, A., Mahmud, I., Azman, N., Hamzah, H., Abd., H. Z., . . . Hamzah, R. (2014). Gender Disparity in School Participation and Achievement:. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 140 , 62-68. Kunos, N. (2015). School-Related Burnout among Hungarian High School Students and Responsibility of Teachers in Prevention – a New Aspect of Teachers’ Competences. EERA-ECER. Lanszki, A., & Kunos, N. (2016). Digital Storytelling (DST) As A Treatment For High School Students (grade 12-13) With School-Related Burnout Syndrome., (old.: http://www.eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/conference/21/contribution/38471/). Dublin. Mehdinezad, V. (2011). Relations between students‘ subjective well-being and school burnout. Journal Plus Education, 7 (2), , 60-72. Raiziene, S., Pilkauskaite-Valickiene, R., & Zukauskiene, R. (2014). School burnout and subjective well-being: evidence from crosslagged relations in a 1-year longitudinal sample. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 116, 3254 – 3258. Salmela-Aro, K., & Näätänen, P. (2006). Short School Burnout Scale. University of Jyväskylä. Salmela-Aro, K., Kiuru, N., Leskinen, E., & Nurmi, J.-E. (2009). School-Burnout Inventory (SBI). Reliability and Validity. European Journal of Psychological Assessment 2009; Vol. 25(1), 48–57. Salmela-Aro, K., Kiuru, N., Pietikainen, M., & Jokela, J. (2008). Does School Matter? The Role of School Context in Adolescents’ School-Related Burnout. European Psychologist, vol. 13(1). Sántha, K. (2015). Trianguláció a pedagógiai kutatásban. Budapest: Eötvös józsef könyvkiadó. Schaufeli, W. B., Leiter, M. P., & Maslach, C. (2008). Burnout: 35 Years of Research and Practice. Career Development International. Schraml, K. (2013). Chronic stress among adolescents. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Tan, Q., & Yao, J. (2012). An analysis of the reasons on learning burnout of junior high school students from the perspective of cultural capital theory: a case study of Mengzhe Town in Xishuangbanna,China. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 46, 3727 – 3731. Tuominen-Soini, H., & Salmela-Aro, K. (2013). Schoolwork engagement and burnout among Finnish high school students and young adults: Profiles, progressions, and educational. Developmental Psychology. Vasalampi, K., Salmela-Aro, K., & Nurmi, J. (2009). Adolescents' self-concordance school engagement, and burnout predict their educational trajectories. European Psychologist, Walburg, V. (2014). Burnout among High School Students: A Literature Review. Children and Youth Services Review.

Author Information

Nora Kunos (presenting / submitting)
Eszterházy Károly Egyetem
Pedagogical Doctoral School
Miskolc

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