Thesis

her family gives her affection and approval. When it comes to education, it has been shown
that people with different quantity of education does not differ very much when it comes to
burnout. However, generally it can be said that burnout seem to occur among those people
who have a college education but does not have postgraduate training. These people are more
inclined in having higher emotional exhaustion, most depersonalization, and least personal
accomplishment. There has also been a reported high level of emotional exhaustion for people
with postgraduate training; however they have scored the lowest on the other aspects of
burnout. Altogether, less education has been connected to less burnout. A potential
explanation for theses results might be that people with different quantity of education acquire
different kinds of job. In relation to this, the mentioned differences between the groups mirror
the emotional strains of their job and not only what kind if education they have. This might
explain why the people with the highest education only reported emotional exhaustion out of
the three aspects of burnout. They might have jobs with higher emotional stress but the
training they have has made it possible for them to cope more effectively with this stress.
Barry (1984) showed that as the level of a nurse’s education is increasing so does the nurse’s
experience of personal accomplishment, workplace satisfaction, and with higher educational
status nurses also coped more sufficiently with work related stressors. All of these factors had
in turn a reduced effect on the burnout levels of the nurses. Finn (2001) demonstrated that
self-sufficiency, professional skill, and education were the factors behind the highest levels of
job satisfaction in nurses. Dahl & O’Neal (1993) conducted an interesting research in nurses
during the Gulf War and among other things they found that higher educational levels were
connected to a more sufficient way of coping with stress and decreased burnout levels.
When it comes to the area of demographic variables and burnout, this dissertation is looking
at this area from a nation-based point of view. More precisely, this dissertation is comparing
the connection between the demographic variables and burnout, between Hungarian and
Swedish emergency nurses. This nation-based comparison has not been done before and thus
this dissertation is offering a new insight into the connection between demographic variables
and burnout for Hungarian and Swedish emergency nurses.