Abstract
The present study, which aimed to identify an effective direction for responding to staff burnout in a facility for persons with disabilities, had 2 objectives: (a) identifying the structure of contexts in which support staff experience difficulties when providing support to users, and (b) examining relationships among cognitive evaluations, the frequency of difficult user support contexts, and occupational stress responses. A factor analysis of 50 items from a preliminary study of contexts posing support problems resulted in the extraction of 3 factors: “difficulty of social communication,” “problems of personal independence,” and “self-injurious and other harmful behavior.” Subsequent correlational and multiple linear regression analyses revealed a particularly strong relation between “difficulty of social communication” and occupational stress responses. These results suggest that simply reducing the frequency of users' difficult contexts through direct intervention by specialists would not be sufficient to alleviate staff burnout. They also point to the potential usefulness of modifying the cognitive evaluations of problematic contexts by support staff.
