Burnout Levels among Senior Students in Applied Sciences Faculties: An Empirical Analysis in Turkey

Today, one of the most disputable topics of the business world is burnout. Burnout is mostly mentioned when it comes to stress, but it has more serious consequences than stress with regards to organizational structure. Students also experience burnout as much as the employees in the business life. Some of the students, who are employed in the business after their graduation from the university, both works in the business sector and continue their education as graduate or Phd students. This study aims to analyze the burnout levels of graduate students who study at Graduate Departments of Applied Sciences Faculties in Turkey. The study results showed that graduate students experienced a low level of burnout. In addition, it was found out that there were differences between the sub-dimensions of burnout based on students’ gender. However, no difference was found between the levels of burnout and whether graduate students work in a profession.


Introduction
Burnout defines the situation of a person experiencing energy decrease, increased anxiety, negative feelings and thoughts about oneself, insufficiency and failure in addition to loss of motivation, interest, and ambition. A burnout person experiences this condition either by mental breakdown or desensitization or decreased motivation of success. Each of these conditions severely affects people's routine life, functionality and responses. They also result in insufficiency of people by gradually decreasing their desire, power, efforts, positive feelings and behaviors about their profession, school, family responsibilities, individual responsibilities, and the other occupations.
Having preferred to go back to being a student again after the graduation from 4-year university life, graduate and doctorate students usually have great potential to be researched regarding "students' burnout". In comparison with 4-year undergraduate students, these students are in a population who started working as professionals, have increased social consciousness, and position themselves with a more settled individual vision. Many studies were conducted about the burnout levels of 2-year or 4-year university students studying at different disciplines mainly including Medicine, Health Sciences, and Education Sciences (Erturgut and Soyşekerci, 2010;Yang, 2004, Fares et al. 2016Pala, 2012Pala, :1766. However, almost no study was done particularly about the burnout levels of graduate and doctorate students studying at Social Sciences. For this reason, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the burnout levels of graduate students studying at Graduate Degree of International Trade and Logistics in Applied Sciences Faculties.

Literature
According to Maslach (1982), burnout has three interrelated dimensions that include emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a diminished feeling of personal accomplishment. During the past decades, various studies on student burnout have been carried out (Chang et al, 200:29;Yang, 2004:283-301;). These studies assessed "academic burnout" in students (Fares et al. 2016:177). Findings from a study carried out on educational faculty students in Turkey were not very high. (Pala, 2012(Pala, :1774. Another study about university students claim that school engagement presented inverse and significant influence on burnout syndrome among pharmacy students (Lucindo et al. 2016). Research findings from Kristanto et al. (2016) evidenced partial associations between academic burnout and eating disorder among university students. According to Skodova and Lajciakova (2013) Psychosocial training positively influenced burnout among university students in health care professions. Skodova et al. (2016), aiming to reveal differences in levels of burnout syndrome among nursing/midwifery and psychology students, concluded that burnout levels of students who read nursing/midwifery were higher than those who read psychology.According to Silva et al. (2016), another study examining the burnout of nursing students, the burnout level was found to be higher in single, no children, non-sports and non-scholarship female students between 20-24 years of age. Tsarkova (2016), compared burnout levels of students-psychologists and professional-psychologists. In the study, it has found that the level of emotional burnout of the 30% of professional-psychologists is higher than average. As for studentspsychologists, 10% of them are represented by high level of emotional burnout. Layth (2017), investigating whether there is any relationship between time management, personality, social support and burnout, found that the dimensions of time management and social support have correlation with burnout. On the other hand, it has been found that the burnout has no effect on gender differences or age groups.Indicating that the students who could not cope with the lessons left the school by being burnout, Arlinkasari et al. (2017) tried to analyze the psychological reasons of this situation.As a result of the study, it was stated that students with high academic engagement cause less burnout. Hernesniemi et al. (2017) examined the burnout levels of Finnish and Chinese students who have different cultures in the study. The results of the research showed that the factors affecting the burnout levels of the students of both countries were similar.

Methodology
In this section, Research questions, the population and sample group of the study, data collection tools, and data analysis statistics are listed.

Research Questions of the Study
This study seeks answers for the following research questions regarding senior students' burnout levels.
1. What are the burnout levels of the students in a general sense? 2. Is there a difference between students' burnout levels based on the sub-dimensions of burnout?
3. Is there a difference between students' burnout levels based on their gender? 4. Is there a difference between students' burnout levels based on their employment status?

Research Population and Sample
The research population is consisted of graduate students studying at Applied Sciences Faculties of different universities in Turkey or students who applied to these programs. In this context, 37 of 42 questionnaires, which were distributed to students in August 2016, were considered valid and involved in the study.

Data Collection Tools
In this study, a Personal Information Questionnaire was used to determine the demographic variables related to students. Additionally, Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) was used to determine the factors that lead students to burnout, which is also the main focus of the study. This inventory was developed by Maslach and Jackson in 1981, and it has a total of 20 statements. 8 of these statements are related to Emotional Exhaustion, 5 of them are about Depersonalization, and 7 of them are related to Reduced Personal Accomplishment. 5 Likert-type scale was used in order to measure burnout levels in Maslach Inventory.

Data Analysis Statistics
Data obtained through questionnaires was analyzed by "SPSS 16" Statistics Software, reliability analysis, demographic analysis, variance analysis and T test analyses were used in the study. Confirmatory factor analysis was done in the majority of the studies conducted about Maslach Burnout Inventory, and factor structure was investigated. Çapri

Findings on the Reliability and Validity Analysis
In this part of the study, findings on the analysis of the collected data are studied. Firstly, reliability analysis for the sub-dimensions of Maslach Burnout Inventory was done, and Cronbach's Alpha coefficients were calculated. In cases when Cronbach's Alpha coefficient value is over 0, 70, the scale is regarded as reliable (Bektaş and Akman, 2013: 128).

Findings on Demographic Variables
Descriptive statistics were used in order to determine the demographic characteristics of study participants.

Findings on Burnout Levels
In general, "T Test" was used to determine students' burnout levels in this study. Moreover, it was necessary to use "t-test" to identify the differences between the sub-dimensions of burnout levels of study participants (number of sample). For this reason, independent sample t-test was conducted as each of the samples in the study was independent of one another and each sub-dimension was given one test. This t-test is a parametric test which is used in studying the differences between the two groups and explains whether there is a statistically difference between the groups (Ural and Kılıç, 2005:172). According to the results of this test, when significance value (2-tailed) is over 0, 05, it is concluded that there is no significant difference between the groups, but when this value is below 0, 05, it is assumed that there is a significance between the groups (Altunışık et al., 2010: 189-192).

Table 4. Burnout in General in Terms of Sub-dimensions
Aritmatical mean, median and standart deviation of Maslach Burnout Inventory Scalehas been given Although there is no significant difference between these variables, it can be claimed that Depersonalization and Reduced Personal Accomplishment values of female participants are higher than those of male participants. Additionally, it was concluded that Emotional Exhaustion of male participants is partially higher than those of female participants.
All these findings are supported by the studies conducted about burnout by Arslan et al. (1996)

Conclusion
The following conclusions were inferred as a result of this paper which studied the burnout levels of the graduate students of Applied Sciences Faculties in Turkey based on different variables.
 Graduate students studying at Applied Science Faculties generally have low levels of burnout in terms of Emotional Exhaustion and Depersonalization burnout sub-dimensions.
 Reduced Personal Accomplishment burnout dimension of students was on the middle degree.
 There is no difference between female and male students in total based on the gender variable.
 In the sub-dimensions of burnout, female students had higher levels of burnout in Depersonalization and Reduced Personal Accomplishment in comparison with male students.
 Male students had slightly higher levels of burnout in Emotional Exhaustion in comparison with female students.
 There is no difference between the employed and unemployed students regarding the sub-dimensions of burnout.