Citation

Thuynsma C, Beer LT. S. Afr. J. Psychol. 2017; 47(1): 46-59.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, SAGE Publications)

DOI

10.1177/0081246316638564

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Burnout is considered an occupational health concern. The burnout-depression overlap is an important area of research as the foundations of burnout and its diagnostic value have come under increasing scrutiny, calling for burnout to not be classified as an independent disorder but rather as a subtype of depression. Furthermore, as burnout is defined as a work-specific syndrome, workplace factors have been argued to be the major indicators of burnout. Recent research however, calls this into question. This study seeks to establish the overlap between burnout and depressive symptoms and to determine if burnout is in fact a multi-domain phenomenon. A crosssectional research design was used, a convenience sample of educators from the Gauteng province of South Africa was collected (N = 399). Confirmatory factor analysis was applied in a structural equation modelling framework. Discriminant validity analysis was conducted by investigating the average variance extracted and the shared variance between constructs. Finally, relative weight analysis was conducted to ascertain the unique contribution explained by the work-specific and general life domain factors.

RESULTS showed that burnout could be distinguished from depressive symptoms. Job demands, depressive symptoms, and satisfaction with life all explained significant amounts of variance in the burnout construct. Relative weight analysis revealed that emotional load and depressive symptoms explained equal amounts of variance in burnout, but that the aggregated work-specific factors explained the most variance in burnout. This study indicates that burnout is a multi-domain phenomenon and not isolated to the domain of work. Further research is needed in this regard.

Language: en