The Relationship between Burnout and Self-Care of Children\u27s Social Service Professionals

AbstractBurnout has plagued human and social services professionals at higher rates than most other professions resulting in the need for interventions and research. The purpose of this quasi-experimental, nonequivalent control groups design was to examine to what degree self-care affects the stress levels of children’s social service professionals in a nonprofit agency in a southern U.S. state. Cognitive activation theory served as the theoretical framework. Nonprobability purposive sampling strategies recruited 77 participants, 21 years of age and older. The study included two groups, with one group received self-care intervention designed to increase self-care and to reduce burnout (N = 56). The second group served as a non-intervention control group (N =6). The 15 Non-responders (N = 15) of the 77 were not included/did not respond. The small sample size may indicate a limited estimation of the impact that self-care training had on burnout. Participants completed the Mindful Self-Care Survey and the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Services Survey. Covariates were years at the social services agency and years in the social services field. Data were analyzed using the Analysis of Covariance. The intervention group reported significantly less self-care and marginally less burnout than the control group. As validity of the findings is diminished based on small and uneven samples, use of findings are limited to guiding future research efforts toward determining the relations between self-care and burnout outcomes