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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
Burned-Out With Burnout? Insights From Historical Analysis, Renzo Bianchi, Katarzyna Wac, James Francis Sowden, Irvin Sam Schonfeld
Burned-Out With Burnout? Insights From Historical Analysis, Renzo Bianchi, Katarzyna Wac, James Francis Sowden, Irvin Sam Schonfeld
Publications and Research
Fierce debates surround the conceptualization and measurement of job-related distress in occupational health science. The use of burnout as an index of job-related distress, though commonplace, has increasingly been called into question. In this paper, we first highlight foundational problems that undermine the burnout construct and its legacy measure, the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). Next, we report on advances in research on job-related distress that depart from the use of the burnout construct. Tracing the genesis of the burnout construct, we observe that (a) burnout’s definition was preestablished rather than derived from a rigorous research process and (b) the MBI …
Burnout: Moving Beyond The Status Quo, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Éric Laurent
Burnout: Moving Beyond The Status Quo, Renzo Bianchi, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Éric Laurent
Publications and Research
Burnout has been defined as a job-induced syndrome combining emotional exhaustion, depersonalization/cynicism, and a sense of reduced personal accomplishment. In this article, we expand on past analyses of burnout by reviewing key, yet overlooked, problems affecting the construct. We concomitantly examine the implications of these problems for the overall validity of burnout research. Our work shows that burnout research is undermined by 4 main problems. First, what constitutes a case of burnout is unclear. Second, the basic conceptualization and operationalization of burnout are ill aligned. Third, burnout is unlikely to be the specifically job-induced syndrome it has been posited to …
Occupational Stress And Preemployment Measures: The Case Of Teachers, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Danqing Ruan
Occupational Stress And Preemployment Measures: The Case Of Teachers, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Danqing Ruan
Publications and Research
This paper describes difficulties involved in conducting cross-sectional and longitudinal research on the effects of occupational stressors on the mental and physical health of veteran workers. The difficulties include (1) the disappearance, prior to the beginning of the investigation, of the casualties of job stress (Kasl, 1983) and (2) selection bias. The paper advances the view that an alternative design, one that (1) follows new workers longitudinally, (2) includes preemployment measures of mental and/or physical health, and (3) controls for nonoccupational stressors is warranted. The alternative design allows for (a) the assessment of the extent to which the findings are …