Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-2021

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

School Psychology

Major Professor

Steve McCallum

Committee Members

Sherry Bell, Merilee McCurdy, Geri Landry

Abstract

To determine the impact of an intervention to improve emotional intelligence (EI) and reduce burnout in educators, 48 in-service educators were randomly assigned to a control or experimental group and administered the Scales of Emotional Functioning: Educators (SEF:ED; McCallum et al., 2019) and the Maslach Burnout Inventory – Educators Survey (MBI-ES; Maslach et al., 2016) before and after intervention. The control group served as a waiting control and completed these instruments again after receiving the intervention. 70% of the participants noted the intervention “helped [them] manage [their] classroom,” though repeated measures ANOVAS yielded little evidence to support this characterization. No statistically significant interaction effects from pre to posttest occurred for the SEF:ED Total EI score (p = .92), the Emotional Awareness scale (EA; p = .78), the Emotional Management scale (EM; p = .71), or the Interpersonal Relations scale (IR; p = .45). Similar results were obtained from the MBI-ES scale: Emotional Exhaustion (EE; p = .38), Depersonalization (DP; p = .97), and Personal Accomplishment (PA; p = .49). No statistically significant main effects occurred for time (i.e., pretest to posttest), Total EI (p = .32), EA (p = .62), or EM (p = .71), but a significant main effect occurred for IR, (p < .05); means decreased. No main effects occurred between pretest and posttest means on the MBI-ES EE scale (p = .13), DP scale (p = .35), or PA scale (p =.32), or for the control and experimental groups effect on the EE scale (p = .06) or DP scale (p = .72). A significant main effect did occur between the experimental and control group for the PA scale (p < .05); the experimental group yielded a higher mean PA score than the control group. For the waiting control participants, no significant change occurred from posttest administration to post-posttest administration on the EE (p = .14) or DP scales (p = .63). A significant mean increase occurred from posttest to post-posttest on the PA scale (p = .05) after intervention. Implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research are discussed.

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