Features of emotional burnout of employees of preschool educational institutions

Abstract

Introduction. In this article, on the basis of quantitative and qualitative research methods, the emotional burnout of day-care assistants and speech therapists of municipal preschool educational institutions was studied. In recent years, there has been an increase in the importance of the psycho-emotional component of the professional portrait of an employee of preschool educational institutions. The content of pedagogical professional activity includes many factors that provoke the emergence of professional deformation of a specialist. Materials and methods. Emotional burnout (according to the method of K. Maslach and S. Jackson in the adaptation of N. Vodopyanova) and the working capacity index (WAI) were studied in day-care assistants and speech therapists working in preschool educational institutions, as part of a cross-sectional study, in-depth interviewing was conducted. The SPSS 23 software package was used for statistical analysis. Results. Day-care assistants and speech therapists of preschool educational institutions, who have a long work experience, have fully realized and adapted to their profession and do not note emotional and psychological overloads. The results of a qualitative study indicate the dominance of subject-object (educator – child) relationships within the framework of preschool education, the presence of a complex psychological space (preschool is visited by children with various psychophysiological, emotional, behavioral characteristics), the settling of negative emotions inside the personal space of the educator and the speech therapist teacher and, as a consequence, the inability to dispose of them (personal psychotherapy, supervision, professional intervention) without negative consequences. Limitations. The study has professional (day-care assistants, speech therapists) limitations. Conclusion. These results suggest the problem of emotional burnout to be quite deep and not realized by teachers and day-care assitants. The resources of quantitative research methods for educators and speech therapists of preschool education on the topic of professional burnout and deformation were shown to be significantly limited and fail to allow achieving objective results, which requires the development of new approaches to assessing teachers’ emotional burnout.