Construction and validation of the Areas of Academic Life Scale to measure organizational risk factors for student burnout.

OBJECTIVES: Academic burnout poses a challenge to the educational process. Higher education institutions have responsibilities similar to the ones of management in business settings. These institutions are responsible for creating conditions conducive to development and, as such, may be interested in verifying the presence of student burnout and pinpointing its causes. The purpose of this study was to answer these needs and develop a scale to measure the effect of organizational factors that may predict student burnout. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This paper reports the results of a study conducted on a sample of Polish students (N = 659) to construct and validate a multidimensional measure of organizational factors impacting academic burnout, focusing on students. For background purposes and as a starting point, the authors used the concept of the areas of worklife by Ch. Maslach and M. Leiter, who identified 6 areas of the work environment that affect the relationships people develop with their work, i.e., workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. RESULTS: The authors assessed the factor structure, reliability, and construct validity and performed confirmatory factor analysis of the new scale to measure 6 areas of academic life. Given the results of this study, the scale can be recommended as an adequate tool to measure organizational (academic) factors of burnout in students. CONCLUSIONS: The authors have validated the final scale, which can be used to advance the understanding of the academic burnout phenomenon. Int J Occup Med Environ Health. 2023;36(6):798-811.

Academic Burnout of Polish Students: A Latent Profile Analysis.

According to Maslach and Leiter, burnout syndrome consists of three elements: exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of ineffectiveness experienced by individuals in the work environment. However, burnout does not only apply to professional activity but can also be experienced by students pursuing higher education. This is important because the consequences of student burnout can be related to students' mental and physical health. Until recently, the dominant diagnostic trend in the studies of burnout syndrome was based on a variable-focused approach. This approach focuses primarily on identifying subgroups in the population and presents different configurations of the various dimensions of burnout. However, there is emerging research using a person-centered approach and including the analysis of latent profiles to study professional and student burnout. This approach allows us to isolate subgroups of individuals in the study sample who have a similar burnout pattern. It focuses on the differences between individuals, which helps us to look at the phenomenon of professional burnout from a different perspective and shows the individuality of its experience. Our research aimed at identifying latent profiles, was conducted on a sample of 1519 Polish students, and partly confirms reports from other countries. We identified four profiles: low burnout, moderate below-average burnout, moderate above-average burnout, and very high burnout groups.

Job insecurity and emotional disturbance of Polish employees during pandemic COVID-19.

BACKGROUND: The pandemic, as an event that is new and dangerous to the health and life of the population, has put employees at risk of losing their job and experiencing deteriorating working and employment conditions. In this situation, authors were particularly concerned with the extent to which job insecurity (both quantitative and qualitative) contributed to the deterioration of workers' well-being. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The study was carried out on 382 Polish employees in April and May 2020. The following research tools were used: the Job Insecurity in Pandemic Scale by Chirkowska-Smolak and Czumak and the Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scale (DASS-21) by Levibond and Levibond. RESULTS: The quantitative and qualitative job insecurity were significant predictors of depression and stress, but they did not explain anxiety symptoms. The scope of the explained variance of these negative emotional states by concerns related to work and employment was not large (from 11% to 17.6%). The moderating role of perceived employability was confirmed only in the case of the relationship between qualitative job insecurity and depression, as well as quantitative job insecurity and stress. However, the increase in the explained variance was very small. CONCLUSIONS: Uncertainty related to the maintenance of employment and concerns about the deterioration of working conditions due to the COVID-19 pandemic had an impact on emotional disturbances of employees, but they only explained some of the variance of depression and stress and did not affect the perceived level of anxiety. The smaller role of economic stress in the emergence of negative emotional states could be associated with the occurrence of much more serious threats to the health and life of the population in this period. The very low level of unemployment in Poland, which remained at a similar level throughout the pandemic despite the catastrophic forecasts of economists, could also have played an important role. Med Pr. 2021;72(6):645-52.