A Study On The Relationship Between Social Support, Job Burnout And Post - Traumatic Stress Disorder

The aim of this study was to investigate the overall status our firefighters about thesocial support and work burnout, post-traumatic stress disorder, and to explore the relationship among those three variables, and to lay the foundation of social psychological support system for them.This research started with626firefighters as participants and developed a social support scale applied to the local firefighters. Then1379firefighters from different provinces and municipalities served as subjects, using social support questionnaire and Chinese Maslach Burnout Invertory (CMBI) and PTSD Checklist-Civilian Version (PCL-C) and Impact Events Scale-Revised (IES-R) for survey. Elementary outcomes:(1) the degree of social support of the firefighters is relatively high in our country, in the medium to high level. The descending order is from family support, comrade support, organization support to society support.(2) work burnout of firefighters in our country is close to moderate level, and42.9%of the participants has different degrees of work burnout. Emotional exhaustion is most serious, followed by depersonalization and the diminished personal accomplishment.(3) the prevalence of PTSD in firefighters is6.3%. The score of each PTSD symptoms is in the middle and lower levels. The descending order of severity is from hyperarousal, avoidance to intrusion.(4) the fireman’s social support, work burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder in different demographic variables are on the significant differences.The relationship of social support and job burnout, posttraumatic stress disorder is:(1) when firefighters’ PTSD symptoms are more severe, the degree of work burnout is higher. At the same time, the severity of the hyperarousal and intrusion symptoms is a good predictor of work burnout.(2) the higher the level of social support is, the lower the degree of burnout is. Meanwhile, the comrade support and organization support are good predictors of work burnout.(3) with the improvement of social support level, the PTSD symptoms of firefighters are better. And the organization support is a good predictor of PTSD level.(4) PTSD can serve as a mediator, which plays the partial mediation effect, of social support and work burnout. At the same time, comrade support and organization support mainly influence work burnout through intrusion and hyperarousal.