The Frequency of Academic Burnout and Related Factors among Medical Students at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, in 2016

Abstract Background: Academic burnout is the state of negative emotions and low motivation in one’s education. Understanding the status of academic burnout is the primary step to make proper decisions. The present study, therefore, was conducted to investigate comparative degrees of academic burnout among medical students in their first five semesters of medical education at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. Methods: In the present cross-sectional study, a total of 525 medical students at the School of Medicine filled out the Persian version of Maslach Burnout Inventory – Student Survey from January 15 to February 5, 2016. Chi-square, Mantel-Haenszel, and Kruskal–Wallis tests were run in SPSS for data analysis. P-value<0.05 was considered significant. Results: Based on the collected data, it was shown that 49.2% of the participants were male and 50.8% were female. Only 8 (1.5%) participants were married. No statistically significant difference was observed between the variables investigated and academic burnout (P>0.05). It was also observed that only four (0.8%) medical students (all new-comers) were in low academic burnout group and 521 (99.2%) were categorized in medium academic burnout group. Finally, it was found that academic burnout of the students increase as their educational level advance, making the first-semester students having the lowest and fifth-semester students the highest academic burnout indices (P<0.001). Conclusion: It is concluded that, from among the variables studied, only students’ educational level made a difference in medical students’ academic burnout.Keywords: Academic efficacy; Burnout; Cynicism; Exhaustion; Medical Students