Proactive Coping and Professional Burnout in Special Education

Abstract

Proffessional burnout is a syndrom associated with a group symptoms such as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and personal acomplishements. Proactive coping is considered those cognitive and behavioral efforts made to master and tolerate or reduce internal and external demands and conflicts among them. Special education teachers are in a direct contact with special needs of the students. They are more prone to experience burnout due to the way the perceive job demands and lack of personal resources to use coping strategies. The aim of this is to investigate correlations between burnout and proactive coping categories and to predict which of these correlation variables best predict emotional exhaustion as the main symptom of burnout. Results showed significant correlations between emotional exhaustion and strategic planning, preventing coping and emotional support seeking. Multiple regression analysis was used to predict which variable of proactive coping categories best predict emotional exhaustion. Emotional support seeking had statistic significance to predict emotional exhaustion for the total variances explained in this study.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n3s1p18