The relationship between burnout syndrome and boreout syndrome of secondary school teachers during COVID-19

Abstract

Coronavirus incidence causes the adoption of strict restrictions by governments in most of the countries. There were and still are public areas that are affected more than others – services and schools. In Slovakia, the school closure happened in the middle of March 2020 and lasts until May 2021. This situation puts a huge demand on teachers on all stages. This paper was to describe the difficult situation that occurred worldwide during the spring in 2020. We have focused on 214 secondary school teachers (Mage = 46.9; SD = 11.2; 75.3% females) and their experiences of two dangerous syndromes connected with job performance – burnout and boreout syndrome. Maslach Burnout Inventory (Ráczová & Köverová, 2020) saturated by 3 subscales: depersonalization (α = 0,903), personal accomplishment (α = 0,624) and exhaustion (α = 0,883) and Boreout scale (α = 0,550) (Rothlin & Werder, 2014) were administered. The convenience and purposive sampling method has been used. The data were proceeded by descriptive and correlation analysis (Pearson correlation coefficient). Statistical differences were tested with T-test for independent samples. We found that the level of both syndromes was not high during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic, but female teachers experienced significantly higher emotional exhaustion than their male colleagues. Currently, after the second wave of pandemics, the need for a second round of the research arises what would create the opportunity for comparison. 

Keywords

• burnout syndrome
• boreout syndrome
• COVID-19
• secondary school teacher