Factors Associated With Job Burnout Among Student Counselors

Student counselors are responsible for many aspects of college students'management and ideological education.The mental health of this group needs more attention.Burnout is one of the important factors affecting the mental health of counselors.Previous studies have used student counselors' own perspectives and found that counselor burnout is related to factors such as work content,working hours,and professional identity.This study aims to explore the influence of student factors on counselors' job burnout through the perspective of students.In this study,self-reported questionnaires were administered to collect data from 29 counselors and 1633 students in the private university A.The student questionnaire consisted of four dimensions,including study motivation,self-efficacy,problem behavior and students' perception of their counselor's burnout level.The counselor questionnaire had eight dimensions,namely psychological capital,work stress,teacher effectiveness,organizational commitment,social support,job regulation,decision-making participation and burnout.In addition,both students and counselors responded to basic demographic questions.Through descriptive data analysis and Hierarchical Linear Modeling analysis,this study found that students' perception of their counselor's burnout was significantly related to students' gender,major,grade and student's self-efficacy,learning motivation and problem behavior.Firstly,the exhaustion dimension and depersonalization dimension of the counselor's job burnout were positively correlated with the student's self-efficacy,and the sense of achievement reduction was negatively correlated with the student's self-efficacy.Secondly,the student's problem behavior was positively correlated with the dimensions of student perception for counselor's job burnout.Thirdly,the student learning motivation was negatively correlated with the perceived sense of accomplishment of the counselor;the student's gender,grade,major and student evaluation counselor's exhaustion dimension and sense of accomplishment were related to the two dimensions.The girls perceived the counselor lower levels of exhaustion and more sense of accomplishment reduced,and seniors perceived a higher level of exhaustion and less sense of accomplishment.Compared students with majors of liberal arts,students of science recognized a lower level of exhaustion of counselors,and more sense of accomplishment reduced.In addition,the psychological capital,work stress and burnout of the counselor's self-assessment were not significantly related to the student's perceived counselor's job burnout dimension after controlling the above student variables.The results of this study indicated that the students' perception of the counselor's job burnout was different from the counselor's self-assessment,and the student could be one of the essential reasons associated with the counselor's burnout.Follow-up researches could be combined the counselor's own efforts with changing student problem behavior,improving students' self-efficacy and student learning motivation to reduce the counselor's job burnout.