Thesis

urnout simply shows that the area of personality and burnout still has a long way to go
before more unified results can be found (if ever). The nation-based differences which were
found in the present study also shows that research should take into consideration that
different cultures or countries could possibly attain different connections between burnout and
personality. Also, research can look at different nursing wards, and look at the differences
between personality and burnout there. Possibly research should not merely be targeting
nurses but should include other health care workers as well to see if the situation is different
there, and future research could even make comparisons between nurses and other health care
workers.
The fact that the present study showed that higher psychological immunity resulted in lower
burnout for the Swedish nurses; the second part of the fourth hypothesis could be supported.
Other researchers have still to confirm these results and this study hope to have contributed to
the gap in the literature in connection to this area. This study also hopes to have contributed
with a new branch of the burnout research tree, which hopefully will give other researchers a
curiosity to either confirm or disconfirm the present study’s findings.
5.5. BURNOUT AND SOCIAL SUPPORT
Hypothesis 5: In this study social support was expected to serve as a protective factor for the
Hungarian nurses. It was anticipated that the Hungarian nurses would be married or in a
relationship to a higher degree than the Swedish nurses and thus gain more social support
from a husband or partner. This higher degree of partner support, resulting from being in a
relationship, would then be expected to be related to lower burnout in the Hungarian nurses.
When it comes to the results for the fifth hypothesis, regarding burnout and social support, it
was shown that no significant differences could be found for social support between the two
samples. Since social support was proven not to be significantly different in the Hungarian
and Swedish nurses, it could not be related to lower burnout for the Hungarian nurses. Thus,
the fifth hypothesis could not be supported. This result was somewhat disappointing since
numerous previous studies have found a positive relationship between social support and
burnout (see for example Baruch-Feldman et al., 2002; Carlson & Perrewé, 1999; Schaufeli &
Greenglass, 2001). However, the results were not completely discouraging since there have