Researching burnout in Spanish teachers: a review of the associated factors and assessment instruments

Abstract

INTRODUCTION. Stress can be one of the triggers of burnout syndrome, a disorder characterized by physical, psychological and emotional exhaustion. However, when we refer to teachers’ burnout, stress is not the only marker leading to the onset of this condition. This brings to light the importance of carrying out different types of research keeping in mind the elements or factors identified as most critical in burnout development within diverse teaching stages as well as the different existing instruments used to collect data concerning this phenomenon. Because of that, our main objective is to identify and to analyze the main factors taken into account on the study of Spanish teachers´ burnout syndrome and to determine the main instrument tailored for this purpose. METHOD. The present paper presents a systematic review considering multiple electronic bibliographic databases such as Dialnet, Web of Science and ScienceDirect. The descriptors “burnout”, “maestr*”, “docen*”, “profesor*”, “educaci*” and “Españ*” as well as their transcriptions into English were utilized together with “AND” and “OR” Boolean operators. A total of 2969 documents were found, out of them 35 were selected for a more in-depth study after the application of exclusion and inclusion criteria. RESULTS. 52 factors were found and divided in 7 groups (socio-demographics, academic, professional, contextual, social, psychological and health). Secondary Education was the most studied stage (74,3%) and university stage the least one (17,1%). MBI “Maslach Burnout Inventory” by Maslach and Jakson (1989) remains as the most used instrument in burnout study. Socio-demographic variables were the most repeated among the publications (94,4%), being gender (91,43%), age (77,14%) and teaching experience (34,29%) the factors that excelled from the rest. DISCUSSION. This systematic review highlights the great factors variation in terms of the Spanish teachers´ burnout study. It lays the construct open to the need for a thoroughly aspects investigation and comparison within the teaching area.