Thesis

in particular. Thus, lower life satisfaction scores could be explained by the fact that the
Hungarian nurses have to live with these post-socialist transformations and face them every
day at their workplaces, whereas Swedish nurses have a completely different and more stable
political background not related to post-socialist transformations, making their lives in- and
outside their workplaces much easier, and hence much more satisfactory.
In the second part of the third hypothesis it was assumed that higher life satisfaction scores
would result in lower burnout scores for the Swedish nurses. The results showed that this was
not the case. Thus, this part of the third hypothesis was not supported. It was shown that life
satisfaction did not have any influence on burnout, even when nationality was taken into
consideration. Demerouti et al. (2000) conducted a research with regard to burnout and
satisfaction with life, and found a connection between emotional exhaustion and life
satisfaction. They especially found a connection between burnout and life satisfaction in
relation to relationships with the patients, time pressure, physical and mental workload,
negative environmental conditions, and problem with the schedule. Since relationships with
the patients, workload, and negative environmental conditions were also mentioned under
work-related stress factors in the present study, it would have been interesting to see whether
these factors could have been significantly correlated with life satisfaction in the present study
as well. Lee et al. (2004) have found that life satisfaction is negatively associated with
burnout. More specifically, they found that life satisfaction was more significantly related to
negative work effects than positive ones. Their study found that personal accomplishment and
emotional exhaustion were the two dimensions most significantly predicting life satisfaction.
Thus, lower levels of emotional exhaustion and higher levels of personal accomplishment
reported higher levels of satisfaction with life. This is contradicting to the findings in the
present study, which failed to find any associations between burnout and life satisfaction. Tait,
Padgett & Baldwin (1989) found that life satisfaction was more significantly related to
positive work effects than negative ones since they found a significantly positive association
between life satisfaction and satisfaction with the job. This is in contradiction to Lee at al.’s
(2004) finding. A study which showed that burnout cannot be connected to either negative
work effects or positive work effects was Demerouti et al. (2000) who showed that job
demands and job resources did not have any affect on life satisfaction in their sample of
nurses. Also, Gulalp et al (op. cit.) showed that burnout was not related to life satisfaction and
the researchers point out the fact that in their research, organizational factors had a more
significant impact on burnout in their sample of emergency nurses than life satisfaction. Thus,