Prevalence of Burnout Syndrome in Female Elementary School Teachers of Karachi, Pakistan

Abstract

Background: Female teachers like other professionals, also face stress and exhaustion due to their jobs, which may lead to burnout. Objective: To investigate the various degrees of burnout and its association with demographic factors on female teachers of private and public sector elementary schools, Karachi Pakistan. Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried out on 800 female teachers in Karachi Pakistan, from January to May 2017. MBI-HSS was used as an instrument for this extensive study, data was stored and analyzed on IBM-SPSS version 22.0. Pearson chi-square was done to see the association of demographics with burnout, one-way ANOVA to compare scores of MBI with marital status and zone, Tukey’s test for multiple comparisons between the groups, and Cronbach's alpha to evaluate the measure of internal consistency. Results: The results revealed that among the female elementary school teachers, a total of 96.9% reported burnout (13% mild, 58% moderate, 19.6% severe, 6.3% extreme) and 3.1% had no burnout. Burnout varies with marital status (highest in married participants) and zone (highest in east zone) (p values<0.05) only. One-way ANOVA demonstrate that the separated women had higher mean scores on MBI scales compared to married & unmarried women (p-value =0.48), furthermore, East zone respondents have higher MBI scores as compared to all other regions. Tukey’s test showed that East zone gave significant mean differences for south and west zone (P-value <0.05). Cronbach’s alpha was found to be (0.384) for the overall scale confirming the reliability of subscales and MBI. Conclusion: Our results show a high prevalence of burnout and the positive association of Burnout with marital status and zones.