The Mediating Role of Psychological Resilience in the Relationship between Religious Coping and Burnout among Nurses

Abstract

Nurses are healthcare professionals who are in constant interaction with both the patients and their teammates. This state of constant interaction increases their propensity to burnout. However, with the pandemic the risk of burnout has increased even more due to issues such as contagiousness, threat of death, increased workload, uncertainty of the whole process, having to go through long periods of time with the patients while being separated from their family increasing their stress levels. While struggling with all these stress factors, nurses are boosted by other factors which support their ability to cope. It is important to examine religious coping tendencies as a factor that boosts or weakens their psychological resilience. The aim of this research was to determine the interaction between burnout, psychological resilience and positive/negative religious coping levels among a working group where burnout is high, nurses. The main purpose of the research is to examine the mediating role of psychological resilience in the relationship between positive/negative religious coping and burnout syndrome. It was also discussed whether the marital status and age groups of the individuals caused any difference in these variables. The study was created based on the relational screening model with the participation of 250 nurses working in health facilities. Personal Information Form, Maslach Burnout Scale, Brief Psychological Resilience Scale and Religious Coping Scale were administered to the participants. Data analysis of the participants reached by snowball sampling method was carried out using IBM SPSS Statistics 26 and Smart PLS Version 3.3.2 package software. It is seen that marriage has a positive effect on positive religious coping. It can be said that married people have a higher positive religious coping tendency than single people. These findings confirm the first part of the H1 hypothesis which says “Married people use positive religious coping more than single people”. On the other hand, no effect of marital status on negative religious coping, resilience and burnout syndrome was detected. Therefore, the second part of the H1 hypothesis and the whole of the H2 hypothesis were not supported by the findings. When the effects of age on religious coping, resilience and burnout syndrome were examined, no effect on positive religious coping, negative religious coping and psychological resilience was detected. There is a negative correlation between age and burnout syndrome. It can be said that as people's age increase, their tendency to burnout decreases. Our findings show that while all of H3 and the first part of H4 were rejected by the data, the second part of H4 which says “Burnout decreases with age” was supported. When the effects of positive religious coping on other variables were examined, no positive or negative statistically significant effect on psychological resilience and burnout syndrome is observed. It is not statistically possible for resilience, one of the research items of the study, to play a mediating role between positive religious coping and burnout syndrome. Therefore, it can be said that the H5 and H8 hypotheses were rejected by the data. It is seen that negative religious coping affects both psychological resilience and burnout syndrome. Negative religious coping negatively affects resilience. It can be said that as individuals' negative religious coping tendency increases, their psychological resilience tends to decrease. There is an inverse relationship between resilience and burnout syndrome. As the resilience levels of nurses decrease, their tendency to burnout increase. Therefore, the resilience factor plays a mediating role between the other two variables. To expand on this indirect effect further, negative religious coping reduces the psychological resilience of individuals and therefore indirectly increases their level of burnout. The effect of negative religious coping on burnout syndrome was statistically significant. 0.077 part of the positive effect with a coefficient of 0.208 is indirectly realized through psychological resilience. It can be said that the H6, H7 and H9 hypotheses were supported.