Thesis

feel supported at home and feel the same amount of support at her workplace must have truly
positive benefits and should possibly be researched more extensively.
Most of the research done in the field of social support and burnout have looked at a specific
health care worker group and then looked at to which degree their stated social support could
be related to burnout (see for example the above mentioned studies). The dispute in the
current research literature is then if the studies could make this connection or not. The present
study falls somewhat out of the frame of the previous research being conducted because this
study was done as a nation-based one and it made the assumption that the Hungarian nurses
would be married to a higher degree and thus have higher social support from their spouses,
which would then result in lower burnout for them. Previous research in this area has not been
found and thus it is difficult to entirely rely on previous research to strengthen the present
study’s results. Social support in (emergency) nurses in different countries is somewhat of a
novelty and especially a comparison between Hungarian and Swedish emergency nurses have
not been found in previous researches. The fact that the Hungarian nurses were not married to
a higher degree than the Swedish nurses made it impossible for the hypothesis to be further
investigated. The assumption that the Hungarian nurses would be in a relationship to a higher
degree was made because it was hypothesized that Hungary is a more collectivistic society
and as such is rating family values higher than Sweden. Sweden was in line with this idea
thought of as a more individualistic society with the majority of people being single as a result
of this. The unexpected result that social support turned out to be high for both the Swedish
and the Hungarian nurses very were interesting results. Thus, first of all it shows that social
support does not have to be connected to marital status since the majority of the Hungarian
nurses were single and still they experienced high levels of social support from friends and
significant others. Second of all, being married does not have to be a guarantee for high levels
of social support as hypothesized in this study. Since the Hungarian and the Swedish nurses in
the present study were shown to experience high levels of social support it might be assumed
that the nurses’ levels of psychological well-being in these two samples are high. Just as
Harris & Thomson (1993) have shown, that high perceived social support is connected to
higher psychological well-being.