Examining the burnout levels of the teachers teaching at vocational and technical high schools in terms of some variables

The aim of this study is to determine the burnout levels of the teachers teaching at vocational and technical high schools in terms of demographic variables and some elements which may effect the level of burnout and to try to determine the factors causing burnout. 302 teachers teaching at vocational high schools in Anatolian part of Istanbul participated to this research. In the study, Demographic Information Form containing 18 questions which have been prepared by the researcher to get information about the personal characteristics of the research group and "Maslach Burnout Inventory (1981)" which involves 22 questions and has been developed by Maslach to measure burnout were utilized. In the analyse of data, Independent samples t test, One-way Anova, Tukey HSD, Mann Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis H tests were applied. The results show that the burnout levels of the teachers teaching at vocational and technical high schools are low according to the mean scores of the inventory. The burnout levels of the teachers vary significiantly with the variables of sex, branch, choosing the vocation willingly, being pleased with working as a teacher, being pleased with the current education system and finding himself/herself sufficient to be a teacher, while the levels don't vary with the variables of marital status, service period, service period at current school, age and the number of children. Besides the burnout levels vary significiantly with the workload, reward, control, fairness, community and values. Keywords: Burnout, vocational and technical high school, teacher, exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced personal accomplishment