A study on burnout and job satisfaction levels of child welfare workers

This study was carried out to determine the individual and organizational factors affecting job satisfaction and professional burnout levels of care providers and members of the profession working in organizations that provide live-in care service for children in need of protection. The sample of the study consists of 101 children welfare workers working in child homes in Gumushane. Data collection was performed by a Personal Information Form, Job Satisfaction Scale and Professional Burnout Scale. For the statistical analysis, the results for identifying the staff were expressed as percentage and on an average basis, Mann Whitney U was used to compare scores of job satisfaction and professional burnout for some variables of a staff and Pearson Correlation test was used for the correlation between the scale scores. The analyses have shown that the staff have a moderate level of job satisfaction and lower level of professional burnout and 17.8% of the staff intend to leave the job in the near future. The group with higher education level was found to have higher burnout level (p<0,05). An important factor affecting the job satisfaction of the staff is vocational education. The level of job satisfaction for the staff with vocational education is higher than the staff with no vocational education (p<0,05). It has been determined that emotional burnout levels of members of profession among the staff are significantly higher than those of the care providers (p<0,05). It is concluded that the problems related to work life negatively affect the levels of job satisfaction and professional burnout of the members of profession.