CONSEQUENCES OF TRAUMA EXPOSURE AMONG FIRE FIGHTER WORKERS: MODERATING ROLE OF COPING STRATEGIES
Keywords:
Work Place Burden, Burnout, Trauma Exposure, Coping StrategiesAbstract
The present study aimed to find out the relationship between work place burden, burnout, trauma exposure and coping strategies among fire fighter workers. Sample of 100 Fire fighters (50 Male, 50 Female) were taken from different fire fighter offices of Faisalabad. Purposive sampling technique was used in order to collect data. Age range of the participants were 20-35. The Workplace Stress Scale by The Marlin Company (1978), The Maslach-Burnout Inventory (MBI) by Maslach and Jackson (1981), The Traumatic Exposure Severity Scale (TESS) by Elklit and Brink (2004) and Coping Scale by Hamby et al. (2013) were used for data collection in current research. The SPSS 23 was used for data analysis. Results revealed that greater job burden has been associated with burnout and heightened vulnerability to traumatic experiences meaning that greater job burden leads to both emotional stress and traumatic experiences. There is a tendency that the coping strategies decrease with an increase in the workplace burden and this postulates that the effectiveness of coping efforts is diminished by the high level of work pressure. Traumatic situations also contribute to burnout in that firefighters are exposed to more traumatic experiences which also shows the extent to which the job can be very emotionally taxing. Also, the exposures to trauma are linked to poorer coping skills as demonstrated by the ability to wear off emotional resilience which can be caused by repeated episodes of critical events. Results revealed that coping strategies do not moderate the relationship between work place burden, burnout and trauma exposure among fire fighter workers. Findings indicated that there were a higher workplace load and exposure to trauma in males, with no observable significant difference between the genders in burnout and coping.
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