Contribution of Gender, Marital Status, and Age to English Language Teachers’ Burnout

Abstract

Teaching is a stressful job and can lead to teachers' burnout. Teachers feel burned out when they experience high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization but low levels of personal accomplishment (Maslach, 1999). A wealth of research is available on this subject but the findings are inconsistent. The present study surveyed the level of burnout among a randomly selected group of English language teachers (n = 315) in Malaysia. It also investigated whether these teachers' gender, age and marital status could significantly contribute to their burnout levels. Maslach's Burnout Inventory (Maslach & Jackson, 1986) was used to collect the data. According to the results, the teachers suffered from significantly high levels of burnout in reference to their PA scores. In comparison with the male teachers, female teachers reported significantly higher levels of burnout considering their emotional exhaustion ( p = .008), depersonalization (p = .002) and personal accomplishment (p = .000). Additionally, older teachers (aged ≤ 40) were significantly more burned out than their younger colleagues (aged ≥ 30), regarding their depersonalization (p = .001) and personal achievement (p = .000) mean scores. Finally, married teachers indicated significantly higher levels of burnout compared with those who were not married. The study is expected to have useful implications for teachers, administrators, and researchers.

Development of Burnout Syndrome in Non-university Teachers: Influence of Demand and Resource Variables

“…Given this prevalence in recent years, the study of burnout in the education sector has become increasingly important (Kim and Burić, 2019;McLean, D., et al, 2019;Schonfeld et al, 2019). Most research has pointed out the importance of burnout on teachers (Kaur and Singh, 2014;Yerdelen et al, 2016;Salmela-Aro et al, 2019;Schonfeld et al, 2019;Mäkikangas et al, 2020;Pyhältö et al, 2021), considering it as a risk for teachers (Cecho et al, 2019) that can affect negatively their well-being (physically and psychologically) (Mousavy, 2014), effective teaching (Yerdelen et al, 2016), the interaction with students (Travers, 2001), their motivation for the job (McLean, L., et al, 2019), absenteeism (Makhdoom et al, 2019), depression (Martínez-Monteagudo et al, 2019), insomnia (Gu et al, 2020), or a decrease in the capacity to give support to the students (Jennings and Greenberg, 2009).…”

A review of burnout in college English teachers in China

“…Micro-dimensions analyze how teachers’ individual differences impact teacher burnout. Many studies have been conducted on the relationship between burnout and individual factors, such as age, gender, and marital status ( Mousavy and Nnmehchisalem, 2014 ). The selected articles demonstrate that educational background, professional title, and years of teaching experience are associated with burnout rates.…”

Mental Health and Wellbeing of Secondary School Teachers in Malaysia

“…The results of the present study will be able to address several gaps from previous research. Most of the previous studies related to burnout amongst Malaysian teachers were conducted within a limited geographical scope and did not examine its distinction between or its prevalence among different age groups (Amzat, 2021;Mousavy & Nimehchisalem, 2014;Mukundan & Ahour, 2011;Roslan et al, 2015;Thomas et al, 2012). Similar previous studies on the teachers' stress level also cover either a single state in Malaysia or a limited geographical range (Hadi et al, 2009;Ismail et al, 2019;Othman & Sivasubramaniam, 2019;Samad et al, 2010;Shen et al, 2018).…”