Several factors, such as changing academic environmental conditions and the naturé of human service work, can be stressful for two-year college counselors. If stress from these sources goes unrelieved for prolonged periods, burnout can result. Although the literature suggests that social support can be an effective means of coping with burnout, studies are few and scattered among different occupational groups. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence that social support variables (spouse/confidant, friends, co-workers, and supervisors) had on burnout in two-year college counselors. In addition, several job-related and demographic variables, found to be related to burnout in previous studies, were also used for this study. A randomly selected group of counselors employed at two-year colleges throughout the United States during the 1987-88 school year were surveyed. Descriptive data were computed on all the variables in this study. The descriptive statistics for burnout found only 18 counselors out of 507 experiencing high level of burnout as defined by Maslach (high scores on the emotional exhaustion subscale, and depersonalization accomplishment subscale). This somewhat surprising finding negated the possibility of trying to predict burnout by Maslach's definition. Therefore, attention was redirected at predicting scores for each of the three burnout subscales (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a recoded composite burnout score). Major findings were: (a) age was a significant predictor of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and the composite burnout score; (b) emotional exhaustion decreased when opportunities for time-out increased and co-worker support, supervisor support, and total support increased; (c) depersonalization and burnout decreased when the number of full-time equivalent counselors increased and co-worker support, supervisor support, and total support increased; (d) personal accomplishment increased when counseling responsibilities increased and spouse/confidant support and total support increased. / Ed. D.

This study examines turnover among direct-care staff of community residential facilities. Turnover is of concern as the projected rate indicated by direct-care staff is 34%. A review of personnel records project an annual turnover rate of 40%. Stress is examined for its relationship to turnover. The Maslach Burnout Inventory is used to measure the perceived stress level of staff. Results indicate direct-care staff are not stressed to the point of burnout in two of the three subscales of the Maslach Inventory. Further analysis reveals no significant relationship between stress and turnover intention. Role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload are examined for any relationship to degree of stress and turnover. No relationships were found between these sources of stress. Although no relationship exists between perceived stress, roles, and turnover, direct-care staff's reasons for leaving may be related to more money and better management. In order to reduce turnover, potential strategies for administrator's may to be to clearly define the job of direct-care staff and provide sufficient recognition. / Ed. D.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of job stress and other selected variables on self-reported levels of professional burnout among psychologists practicing in Virginia public schools. The study was also designed to analyze burnout not just as a series of changes resulting from job stressors, but explained by interactions of occupational stress with select demographic characteristics and coping variables. A survey packet containing rating scales and a demographic sheet were mailed to 504 school psychologists, of which 180 responded with usable data. Data analysis primarily involved hierarchical multiple regression, testing the model that interactions of job stress with demographic/coping variables would significantly affect burnout outcomes. Results indicated that burnout, specifically emotional exhaustion partially explained by an unclear or interpersonally conflictual role and having little control over one's work, was significantly mediated by the coping strategy of cognitive problem solving. This exhaustion aspect of burnout was also substantially affected by membership in professional affiliations. However, job stress related to role overload significantly predicted burnout, but was not significantly mediated by any hypothesized demographic or coping variables. It can be concluded that Virginia psychologists experience particular job stressors, such as role overload, that may lead to emotional exhaustion. Membership in collegial, professional organizations, along with inservice in specific problem-solving skills, may help alleviate this occupational stress. Future research is needed to determine how demographic and coping variables mediate specific aspects of work overload for these professionals. / Ed. D.

The rapid adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs)--electronic versions of a patient's medical history--has been instrumental in streamlining administrative tasks, increasing transparency, and enabling continuity of care across providers. An unintended consequence of the increased documentation burden, however, has been reduced face-time with patients and, concomitantly, a dramatic rise in clinician burnout. Time spent maintaining and making sense of a patient's electronic record is a leading cause of burnout. In this thesis, we pinpoint a particularly time-intensive, yet critical, documentation task: generating a summary of a patient's hospital admissions, and propose and evaluate automated solutions. In particular, we focus on faithfulness, i.e., accurately representing the patient record, and completeness, i.e., representing the full context, as the sine qua non for safe deployment of a hospital-course summarization tool in a clinical setting. The bulk of this thesis is broken up into four chapters: §2 Creating and Analyzing the Data, §3 Improving the Faithfulness of Summaries, §4 Measuring the Faithfulness of Summaries, and, finally, §5 Generating Grounded, Complete Summaries with LLMs. Each chapter links back to the core themes of faithfulness and completeness, while the chapters are linked to each other in that the findings from each chapter shape the direction of subsequent chapters. Given the documentation authored throughout a patient's hospitalization, hospital-course summarization requires generating a lengthy paragraph that tells the story of the patient admission. In § 2, we construct a dataset based on 109,000 hospitalizations (2M source notes) and perform exploratory analyses to motivate future work on modeling and evaluation [NAACL 2021]. The presence of highly abstractive, entity dense references, coupled with the high stakes nature of text generation in a clinical setting, motivates us to focus on faithfulness and adequate coverage of salient medical entities. In § 3, we address faithfulness from a modeling perspective by revising noisy references [EMNLP 2022] and, to reduce the reliance on references, directly calibrating model outputs to metrics [ACL 2023]. These works relied heavily on automatic metrics as human annotations were limited. To fill this gap, in §4, we conduct a fine-grained expert annotation of system errors in order to meta-evaluate existing metrics and better understand task-specific issues of domain adaptation and source-summary alignments. We find that automatically generated summaries can exhibit many errors, including incorrect claims and critical omissions, despite being highly extractive. These errors are missed by existing metrics. To learn a metric which is less correlated to extractiveness (copy-and-paste), we derive noisy faithfulness labels from an ensemble of existing metrics and train a faithfulness classifier on these pseudo labels [MLHC 2023]. Finally, in § 5, we demonstrate that fine-tuned LLMs (Mistral and Zephyr) are highly prone to entity hallucinations and cover fewer salient entities. We improve both coverage and faithfulness by performing sentence-level entity planning based on a set of pre-computed salient entities from the source text, which extends our work on entity-guided news summarization ([ACL, 2023] and [EMNLP, 2023]).

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the relationship between burnout and social support in Minnesota high school guidance counselors during the l983—84 school year. Social support consisted of: work supervisors, peers, spouses, and friends & relatives. Additionally, the relationships between burnout and four demographic and seven job—related variables were investigated. The demographic variables were: age, sex, marital status, and education. The job-related variables were: opportunity for times-out, percentage of contact with troubled students, student/counselor ratio, instruction on stress and burnout reduction, school setting, school size, and years of counseling experience. Finally, the relationships between burnout and several interactive variables were investigated in order to determine if social support had primarily direct or indirect (buffering) effects. Regression analysis was used to test these relationships. The Following variables were consistently significant throughout the study: 2 social support variables-peer support and supervisor support (both negatively correlated with burnout); 1 demographic variable--age (negatively correlated with burnout), and 2 Job-related variables--percentage of contact with troubled students and student/counselor ratio (respectively, negatively and positively correlated with burnout). None of the interactive variables were significant. / Ed. D.

Text in Afrikaans / This study ascertains the extent of the experience of stress and the nature of stress management by educators. The literature showed that stress is defined from various theoretical perspectives; various approaches to stress management exist; and educators manage stress in various ways. This study defines stress from a cognitive-transactional perspective. A qualitative research method was used, descriptive data were generated by focus groups and inductively analysed. The results show that educators experienced stress ( much as seen in the literature) due to organisational, management and personal factors. According to this research, educators experience stress on the physical, emotional, social and intellectual levels. Educators' efforts to deal with stress reflect direct techniques such as seeking personal support and using confrontational techniques, as well as indirect techniques which encompass intellectual and physical techniques. Finally the development of a stress management program for educators is recommended. / Educational Studies / M. Ed. (Guidance and Counselling)

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

Au fil des années, la modification de la Loi sur l'instruction publique (Loi 180) a fait naître plusieurs changements au sein des organisations scolaires francophones du Québec. Ces nombreux changements et l'adoption du projet de la Loi 124 ont contribué à la complexification de la tâche des directrices et des directeurs d'établissements scolaires, en obligeant ainsi ces derniers à être toujours prêts à rendre des comptes (reddition de comptes). L'objectif principal de cette recherche est d'analyser en quoi consiste l'épuisement professionnel des directions et des directions adjointes d'établissement des commissions scolaires francophones du Québec en identifiant les principaux facteurs qui s'y rapportent. Elle évalue empiriquement l'ampleur de la problématique de l'épuisement professionnel ainsi que les facteurs que les directions et les directions adjointes d'établissement, qui ont déjà vécu un épuisement professionnel et/ou un problème de santé relié au stress, perçoivent comme étant un risque pouvant mener à l'épuisement professionnel. Dans un deuxième temps, elle établi les principaux facteurs menant à l'épuisement professionnel, ses conditions d'apparition, les situations professionnelles favorisant son émergence, ainsi que ses manifestations. En fait, elle se veut un outil de référence en matière de prévention de l'épuisement professionnel chez les directions et les directions adjointes d'établissement, tant pour le Ministère de l'éducation, du Loisir et du Sport du Québec (MELS), la Fédération des commissions scolaires du Québec, les différentes associations de directions d'établissement du Québec et les différents acteurs des commissions scolaires et des établissements scolaires du Québec / With the passing of time, the modification of the public education law (Law 180) gave birth to many changes within the French speaking scholastic organization of Quebec. These numerous changes together with the adoption of Law 124 contributed to render extremely complex the responsibilities of the directors of educational establishments by demanding them to be always accessible to provide accountability. The main object of this research is, to analyse what consist the professional 'Burn Out' related to the directorate of French scholastical commissions in Quebec by identifying the principal reasons which applies. It appraises without any doubt the scope of the problem related to the professional 'Burn Out' together with the reasons that the joint/directorate of establishments who have coped with a stress related health problem, understanding the risks associated with the professional 'Burn Out'. Secondly, it establishes the main reasons leading to professional 'Burn Out' its emerging conditional appearance, the situations at the professional level favouring its emergence together with its manifestations. In fact, it could be used as a tool of reference in matters of prevention of 'Burn Out' within the professional establishment, directorate and associate directorate, as well as the Ministry of Education, Recreation and Sport (MELS). Federation of the educational commissions of Quebec, the various associations of educational establishments and the different performers within the education system in Quebec

The purpose of this study will show that teaching is a career that involves a relatively high degree of stress. Without the proper coping skills or strategies, educators can face the risk of burn-out. This study will provide a qualitative and quantitative look into the professions of a group of dual language educators, offering suggestions and insights into the stressors unique to this group of educators.

The purpose of this study is to collect and analyze data obtained from the mental health workers at Masada Homes in Fontana. Specifically, this research project will identify the rates of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and personal accomplishment that are experienced by these mental health workers.