Job Factors that Influence Burnout in Campus Crisis Responders

Abstract

Campus crisis responders are critical to ensuring the safety of students on a college campus. However, attrition in student affairs and specifically in the field of residence life (the department that most professionals that serve in an on-call rotation would fall under), continues to be a concern (Marshall et al., 2016). I assert that burnout of staff members in these roles is a large part of the problem and that managers can ameliorate some of that burnout by controlling specific job factors for those who serve as campus crisis responders. I conducted a quantitative study using an anonymous survey on the Qualtrics platform that was distributed to staff members who serve as campus crisis responders at institutions of higher education. I primarily utilized professional Facebook groups related to Housing and residence life or student affairs in addition to professional email listserves to elicit participants. The effective sample size was 233 and participants were all individuals who serve in an on-call rotation on a college campus. The survey instrument was comprised of demographic questions, as well as questions from the Live-In/Live-On Report (Horowitz 1997) and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (Kristensen et al., 2005). Findings suggest that while participants who identified as female had a significantly higher rate of burnout than those who identified as male, there were no job factors that significantly affected the burnout rate of these staff members. The overall burnout rate of campus crisis responders, however, is significantly higher than that of other populations measured by the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory. With that in mind, hiring managers for campus crisis responders should look at the overall issue of burnout in their staff to address issues of attrition. Future research should include looking at staff and supervisor support, and organizational culture.