Relationships among stress, social support, and burnout in counseling psychology graduate students

Doctoral counseling psychology students may be at risk for burnout given their propensity for trying to balance a desire to help others, academic work, research, practicum experience, and personal lives. Without social support, which has been shown to be related to lower levels of stress and burnout, students may become unhappy and unfulfilled. Examining the relationship of social support, stress, and burnout among counseling psychology graduate students, I hypothesized that social support would buffer the effects of stress on students' reported levels of burnout and career choice satisfaction. Specifically, students experiencing global stress and role conflict (a specific form of stress) who perceived high levels of social support would be more likely to be satisfied with their career choice and less likely to be suffering from burnout than stressed students who perceived less social support. Measures of social support included support from family/friends and other students, as well as two less often studied sources, namely advisors and psychological sense of community.; Two-hundred-eighty-four doctoral counseling psychology students completed confidential on-line surveys about their experiences as graduate students. To test the hypotheses, each outcome measure was regressed on both stressors, all 4 social support measures, and all 8 interaction terms (each stressor X each social support). That is, burnout and academic satisfaction were analyzed in 2 separate regressions.; Contrary to predictions, neither social support nor sense of community significantly moderated the effects of stress on burnout. However, global stress, advisor support, and sense of community were significant predictors of burnout. In terms of career choice satisfaction, sense of community was not only a significant single predictor of career choice satisfaction, but also moderated the effects of global stress on the outcome variable. For students with low global stress, career choice satisfaction increased as sense of community increased. For those with high stress, sense of community made little difference in terms of career choice satisfaction. Essentially, sense of community's moderating effects seemed to be erased by high levels of stress. These results clearly suggest that sense of community is an important variable that has been vastly overlooked in the counseling psychology literature.