Determining of the relationship between the humor style and burnout levels of the nurses working in sergical clinics

ABSTRACTThis study was made to define the relationship between the humor styles and burnout levels of the nurses working in surgical clinics. The research included 250 university graduate nurses employed in surgical clinics within the Practice and Research Centers of Başkent University Ankara Hospital, Başkent University Konya, Ankara and Istanbul.For this research, the Questionnaire for Defining Socio-Demographic and Occupational Qualities, Maslach Burnout Questionnaire and Humor Styles Questionnaire were used. SPSS multi-task statistics program was used to evaluate the data. Kruskall Wallis H and Wilcoxon, Pearson Moment Correlation Coefficient and ANOVA (which is one of the One-Way Variance Analyses) were used to calculate the percentage and frequency in the statistical analysis of the data. According to the research results, 91,6 % of the nurses were female, 69,2 % in 20-29 age span, 60,0 % were single, 89,2 % had a nuclear family, 62,8 % chose the job willingly and 69,6 % had work experience in another institution. 60.0 % of the nurses stated that they were satisfied with their job, 41,2 % expressed burnout and 69,2 % expressed that they believed humor was an efficient method to cope with burnout. In our study, nurses not satisfied with their job ranked high in the subcategory of desensitization and emotional burnout while those with job satisfaction ranked high in the subcategory of personal success. Nurses who think humor as an efficient method to prevent burnout ranked lower in the category of emotional burnout and desensitization but higher in personal success. It was observed that desensitization increased and personal success decreased in nurses who use aggressive and self-defeating humor styles. The research found out that nurses do experience burnout and humor can be employed as a method to reduce it.Key words: Surgical Nursing, Humor Style, Burnout