This master's thesis deals with the stress and occupational burnout of child-care workers in educational and housing groups of youth homes and residential care facilities. The theoretical part of the thesis provides definitions of stress, stress physiology, stressors, types of stress, symptoms and signs of stress, stress factors and causes of stress in the workplace, burnout, reasons for and sources of burnout, and the burnout symptoms that are characteristic of service and care workers. I further explained emotional and behavioral problems of children and adolescents, and described the criteria for their emotional and behavioral problems and disorders. In addition, I defined professionally managed residential care facilities, described the educator's workplace, added recommendations on how to prevent burnout in the workplace, and presented the research work on job stress and burnout in child-care institutions in Slovenia. In the empirical part of the thesis, I used a quantitative research method to investigate in which of the seventeen areas surveyed the psychosocial burdens occur in the workplace and whether there are statistically significant differences in psychosocial burdens between the sexes, age groups and work experience of educators. The sample consisted of 71 educators from all nine Slovenian residential care facilities and youth homes. The results of the research showed that educators were highly burdened/stressed in the following categories: work schedule, role and responsibility; low to moderately burdened/stressed in the categories of workload, speed of work, control, attitude to work, organizational culture and content of work. Low burdens were shown in the following categories: work environment and work equipment, family conditions of the staff, interpersonal relationships at work, workloads due to socio-demographic circumstances, organizational structure, personality traits, psychophysical health, delimitation of private life and work, career development and self-care. I found that there were no statistically significant differences in the psychosocial burdens experienced by women and men working in residential care facilities. I could partially confirm the hypothesis that educators with longer work experience expressed a lower level of workload than educators with shorter working lives, while regarding the workload there was no statistically significant difference between men and women. I further found that younger staff were more prone to burnout compared to their older colleagues, as statistically significant differences in psychosocial burdens were shown.
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