An Assessment of Burnout in Graduate Assistant Certified Athletic Trainers

Abstract

Context: Graduate assistant athletic trainers (GAATs) must balance the demands of clinical care and the academic load of graduate-level students.Objective: To examine burnout among GAATs with clinical assistantships at National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I institutions and to identify the personal and situational variables that are related to burnout.Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Division I universities offering graduate assistantship programs.Patients or Other Participants: Two hundred one GAATs enrolled at NCAA Division I universities with graduate assistantship positions.Main Outcome Measures(s): The Athletic Training Burnout Inventory, which assesses stress and burnout among ATs through 4 constructs: emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, administrative responsibility, time commitment, and organizational support. The 6-point Likert scale is anchored by 1 (never true) and 6 (always true). Results:The GAATs who traveled with athletic teams (4.051 6 0.895) and those who provided classroom instruction (4.333 6 1.16) reported higher levels of stress due to time commitment than those who did not travel (3.713 6 1.22) or teach (3.923 6 0.929). We also found a difference in administrative responsibility across clinical settings (F 6,194 5 3.507, P 5 .003). The results showed that GAATs in NCAA Division I clinical settings (44.55 6 13.17 hours) worked more hours than those in NCAA Division III clinical settings (33.69 6 12.07 hours) and those in high school settings (30.51 6 9.934 hours).Conclusions: Graduate assistant ATs are at risk for burnout because of the time necessary to complete their clinical and academic responsibilities and their additional administrative responsibilities. Graduate assistants who work in the Division I clinical setting are at greater risk for burnout than those in the secondary school setting because of the large number of hours required.

Graduate-Assistant Athletic Trainers' Perceptions of Professional Socialization in the Collegiate Setting: Part I

“…High levels of stress and long work hours put GAs at risk for burnout, especially those in the NCAA Division I setting. 66 …”

The Professional Socialization of the Graduate Assistant Athletic Trainer

“…Researchers 32 have demonstrated that effective onboarding can lead to improved professional and organizational commitment, reduced stress, and improved performance. Graduate assistant ATs are susceptible to burnout as a precursor to departure from the organization 33 ; thus, an orientation session that addresses the expectations and responsibilities of the role may reduce the chance for burnout.…”

Personality Traits and Burnout Among Athletic Trainers Employed in the Collegiate Setting

“…We used a short self-report burnout scale, initially created and validated by Mazerolle et al, 17,18 that reflected measures first used by Netemeyer et al 30 when validating an instrument to measure levels of work-family conflict and various constructs such as burnout, job satisfaction, and turnover. The questions were developed by Mazerolle et al 3 when measuring the effect of workfamily conflict on several outcome variables and before the development of a more specific athletic training burnout measurement. A short-measure scale of burnout was necessary as a means to reasonably measure the concept in our study.…”

“…In fact, burnout has been reported to affect athletic training students, 1,2 graduate assistant ATs, 3 ATs in the collegiate and secondary school settings, [4][5][6][7][8][9] and program directors. 10 Burnout is defined as a psychological state of mental weariness that often occurs when work stresses become too much for an individual to handle.…”