Investigation of the effects of special education teachers' depression, quality of life and burnout levels on attitudes towards children with mental disabilities

Aim: The aim of this study is to measure the burnout, beck depression, attitude and work-life quality levels of 150 mentally handicapped teachers working in special education centers in Malatya, Elazığ and Şanlıurfa provinces, and to examine the effects of these results on their behaviors towards mentally retarded children. Thus, it is expected that the disabled teachers will benefit from this information in distinguishing and determining the officers and personnel to be employed by the managers and administrative units of the disabled education and care centers and the workers who want to learn the levels of burnout, beck depression, attitude and work-life quality. Material and Method: For this purpose, some institutions providing education to private individuals in the specified provinces were determined and scales were applied to the teachers in these institutions. The validity and reliability of these four different scales have been proven. This research was designed with the general survey model, which is one of the quantitative research methods. It was determined that the opinions of teachers with disabilities were obtained by using scales with proven validity and reliability. Results: 150 teachers between the ages of 22-45 working with mentally retarded children were included in the study. In this study, the power of the study was found to be 94% as a result of the post hoc power analysis performed with the Gpower3.1 program using the alpha value (α=0.05), the correlation coefficient between the attitude scale total score and the depersonalization sub-title of the burnout scale (r=0.257) and the number of individuals. Conclusion: In our study, when the relationship between attitudes towards the education of disabled individuals and individual characteristics was examined, it was determined that there was no significant correlation between age, gender, years of service, marital status, number of children and attitude levels. Keywords: intellectual disability, burnout scale, beck depression, work-life quality, attitude scale