The influence of environmental factors on the burnout of physical education teachers in tertiary education

Attendees

The research design used a cross-sectional survey. This study used a stratified sampling design to collect data from participants. Stratified sampling is considered the best method for data collection due to its simple concept. Sampling is based on the assumption that each item in a group has an equal chance of being selected into the sample. Stratified sampling is considered a reasonable data collection method in this study because it ensures the accuracy of parameter estimation and the representativeness of each sample. Therefore, based on the 2020 China University Soft Science Ranking (Shanghai Ranking), we uniformly divide universities in Henan Province into five levels, which use hundreds of indicator variables (including research output and reputation factors) to comprehensively evaluate Chinese universities. Participating colleges and universities are randomly selected from each class. The guidelines for randomly selecting schools from each class are: (a) all classes are clearly distinguished from other classes, (b) all data for each class is consistent, meaning that the selected samples from each class represent the schools of that class represent . To evaluate the representativeness of the sample in demographic data, the general demographic data (2019) was obtained from the Ministry of Education of China. The study used snowball sampling and criterion sampling.

The first author of this study received ethical approval from the Ethics Committee for Human Research, Zhengzhou Technology and Business University, and all methods were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. The participants in this study were informed about the research objectives two weeks before the interview. They were invited to provide data via an online questionnaire. Informed consent was obtained via the web-based survey software “Manjushin” provided by sojump.com. All survey responses were anonymous and participation in the study was completely voluntary. Participants were informed that completion of the survey would have no direct impact on them either in terms of gain or loss, as all data collected would be aggregated and made public only in aggregate form. When participants clicked on a survey, they were taken to a page with brief information about the survey and their rights to privacy and anonymity. Then all they had to do was click ‘Agree to Continue’ to indicate their consent. The link shared with participants contains a questionnaire and instructions on how to complete it. It also includes guidelines informing teachers that their participation will be voluntary, anonymous and confidential. Participants can complete questionnaires on the online platform if necessary. The inclusion criteria for participants were as follows: (1) currently employed full-time at the selected institutions; and (2) participated in gym class in the past year. The criteria for elimination include: (a) regular response patterns; (b) Missing data; (c) Conflicting responses to related projects (such as inconsistent responses to homogeneous projects or consistent responses to opposing projects). Benter and Chou indicated that the sample size should be ten times the number of variables in the analysis²¹. Thus, the minimum sample size in our study was 200, which was considered sufficient to provide good statistical power.

A total of 240 PE teachers from seven colleges and universities in Henan Province, China, participated in this study between March 10 and May 10, 2023 through the “Wenjuan Xing” platform. Of the 240 returned questionnaires, 231 were valid and 9 questionnaires were rejected. Of the valid responses, male teachers accounted for 64% and female teachers for 36%; 77% of teachers had a college degree or higher, and 23% had a bachelor’s degree; 39% of participants had ten years of work experience, 30% had worked three to ten years, 22% had more than 21 years of work experience and the remaining 9% had less than two years of work experience; and in terms of teachers’ professional position, professors accounted for 4%, associate professors for 19%, lecturers for 67%, and teaching assistants for 10%.

Measures

In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current situation of teacher burnout, and to investigate the causes and influencing mechanism of teacher burnout by environmental and individual factors, this study used four questionnaires to measure the level of teacher burnout, the perceived general environment, the level of teaching effectiveness and the level of professional pressure on PE teachers in universities. All questionnaires, originally in English, were translated into Chinese by a bilingual translation expert. They were then tested for clarity and comprehensibility with ten students, ensuring their validity and reliability.

Teacher burnout adopted the Teacher Job Burnout Questionnaire (MBI-ES), constructed by Maleshi et al., which included three dimensions: emotional exhaustion (EE), depersonalization (DP), and low personal achievement (PA), with 21 questions. A 5-point scoring method was used, including: very non-compliant (1 point), relatively non-compliant (2 points), generally compliant (3 points), relatively compliant (4 points), and very compliant (5 points ). . The higher the score, the higher the degree of burnout. The questionnaire is believed to have good reliability, validity and cross-cultural consistency. The internal consistency reliability is 0.83.

The environmental factors adopted the questionnaire compiled from previous research and included support from school, society, family and friends. The school environment consisted of the following five dimensions: the influence of the director, the developmental conditions provided by work, the school atmosphere, interpersonal relationships and the material environment. There were a total of 18 questions, with a 5-point scoring method, including: completely unqualified (1 point), unqualified (2 points), basically qualified (3 points), relatively qualified (4 points), and highly qualified (5 points) . ). The higher the score, the better the school climate. The questionnaire is widely used and is considered to have good reliability and validity. The internal consistency reliability of this study is 0.80.

The effectiveness of teachers’ teaching adopted the scale (TES) established by Yu et al., which includes two dimensions: personal teaching effectiveness (17 questions) and general teaching effectiveness (10 questions). There were 21 questions, with a 4-point scoring method including: completely correct (1 point), mostly correct (2 points), somewhat incorrect (3 points), and completely incorrect (4 points). The higher the score, the higher the teaching effectiveness of the teacher. The internal consistency coefficient of the total table is 0.77, and the internal consistency coefficient of this study is 0.72.

Occupational stress of university teachers adopted the scale established by Li. The questionnaire included five dimensions: job security, educational security, interpersonal relationships, work pressure and job satisfaction, with a total of 24 questions. A four-point scoring method was used, including no pressure (1 point), mild pressure (2 points), moderate pressure (3 points), and heavy pressure (4 points). The higher the score, the greater the pressure. The questionnaire is considered to have good reliability, and the internal consistency reliability of this study is 0.87.

Procedure

A chain intermediary model was used for this research. The data collected was processed in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China. SPSS 22.0 software was used for descriptive statistical analysis, regression analysis and chain-mediated effect analysis. The normality of the collected data was tested using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. First, descriptive statistics and correlation analyzes were conducted in SPSS 21.0 to examine the correlation between key variables. Second, the hypothesized model was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) in Mplus 8.0. The data analysis for this study was divided into four steps: first, the common method bias of the data was tested; second, the job burnout and environment of university PE teachers were described and counted; third, regression analysis was used to examine the predictive relationship between environmental factors, job stress, educational effectiveness, and job burnout; and fourth, the chain intermediary model between occupational stress and teaching effectiveness was tested in the relationship between environmental factors and teacher burnout. Chain mediation refers to the way in which multiple intermediate variables exhibit sequential characteristics, and the predictor variables have indirect effects on the outcome variables through the intermediate chain. Chain mediation can better reveal the complex internal mechanism of the relationship between variables. In the chain model below, Based on the results of the National Education Survey, a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with maximum likelihood estimation was conducted to investigate potential factor structures²². CFA used Satora Bentler’s (SB) robust scaling method. The following four different methods were used to fit the model: (1) Chi-square on SB scale (χ² SB); (2) Standardized root mean square residuals; (3) The estimated root mean square error (RMSEA) of the SB scale; comparison fit index (CFISSB) with (4) SB scale. These indices are used to determine whether the exported model fits the data. The following criteria are used to evaluate model fit: SRMR ≤ 0.08, RMSEA ≤ 0.08, CFI ≥ 0.90. After CFA, evaluate these factors to ensure they provide sufficient variance in the response. The reliability of the initial queues for EFA and CFA was evaluated using Cronbach α. The reliability of the inventory generated by CFA is calculated as a coefficient ω.CFA was performed in R version 4.1.1 using lavaan latent variable analysis package version 0.6.8²³. The model includes three mediation pathways: (1) β1β6, (2) β5β3, and (3) β1β2 β3 (Fig. 1).