Correlates of burnout symptoms among child care teachers. A multilevel modeling approach

ABSTRACT

Burnout is a widespread occupational stress outcome among child care teachers, jeopardizing the quality of care and children’s development. This study aimed at exploring the relationships between individual and organizational level characteristics (representing the six work-life areas control, reward, workload, community, fairness, and values) and burnout levels because these nested associations are an overlooked area. We applied a mixed-effects model with data at the individual level (level 1) and child care center level (level 2) using assessments of 220 child care teachers and their 59 directors of 59 child care centers in a Swiss community. We found that the child care center mattered for the experienced burnout levels and that lower control and reward on level 1 and higher workload on level 2 were associated with higher burnout levels among child care teachers. These results suggest the need to target the individual and the organizational levels to tackle burnout symptoms.

KEYWORDS:

• Burnout symptoms
• child care teachers
• six work-life areas
• individual level
• child care center level

Acknowledgements

We thank Professor Urte Scholz from the Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, for her critical input into the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Other control variables, e.g. working experience and formal qualification, were not significantly related to burnout levels and hence excluded from the analyses.

Additional information

Funding

The data collection was part of a project initiated and financed by the Department of Social Affairs, City of Zurich. The Department of Social Affairs was neither involved in designing and conducting, nor analyzing the data. A grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation [Grant number: POZHP1_159143] financed the data analysis and writing process of this article.