Vocational education, self-employment and burnout among Australian workers

Australian Journal of Social Issues, Autumn, 2009 by Joanna Sikora, Lawrence J. Saha

Data, method and measurement

We use the 2001 data from the International Survey of Social Attitudes (IsssA), collected from a random sample of Australian citizens, drawn by the Australian Electoral Commission from the electoral roll (Kelley & Evans 1999, 2002). The IsssA are academic mail surveys conducted mainly in the 1990s, for which response rates oscillated between 60% and 65%. This compares favourably with other mail-out surveys in Australia and overseas. The 2001 survey collected information about burnout using a modified version of the Dworkin scale (1987). As far as we know, this is the best data source for Australia, because other more recent data sets with appropriate educational and occupational information include no sociological measures of occupational burnout.

As burnout in our data was operationalised by ten indicators, we first factor analysed (1) them to confirm measurement properties of the scale and then constructed a weighted average scale score for each respondent. Our burnout measure ranges from 0 to 100, where the highest score denotes the most intense feelings of burnout. Given that this is a continuous measure, we employ, as our main modeling technique, robust regression as available in STATA 9 in the RREG procedure. Because occupational burnout is by definition work-related, only people in the labour force at the time of the survey are included in the analysis, which reduces the sample size to approximately 800 individuals (2).

To demonstrate that burnout cannot be conceptually reduced to work-related stress, we also model another dependent variable denoting stress. It is measured by a three-item scale comprising reports of fears 'that the amount of stress in my job will make me physically ill'; perceptions that 'My work is more stressful that I had ever imagined' and lack of identification with the proposition that 'I feel that I am usually able to handle the stress levels on my job'. Likert type five-response categories were used to record respondents' perceptions and we also factor analysed them to confirm that they constituted a scale. The resulting stress scale has good measurement characteristics and has been used in prior research by Saha and Dworkin (2004; 2006).

Age is measured in years, gender is a dummy variable on which men are scored 1 and women 0, education is conceptualised as a continuous variable depicting years of schooling, complemented by two dummy variables to distinguish people with basic vocational and skilled vocational qualifications, in this case defined as the ABSCQ levels 6 and 7. We began our preliminary analyses from coding all ABSCQ levels into dummy variables, but this did not result in more explanatory power so we adopted a more parsimonious model employing education in years supplemented with only two dummy predictors without any loss of information. Occupation is measured in the Worldwide Status Scores (Kelley 1990), which are conceptually very similar to ISEI scores (Ganzeboom & Treiman 1996) used by the PISA surveys (OECD 2002). We also distinguish between holders of supervisory positions and those who work exclusively as supervisees, as this is likely to be crucial for feeling empowered or powerless on the job. The self-employed are all people who reported running their own business, coded into three occupational groups: the unskilled, the skilled and professionals, based on the Erikson, Goldthorpe and Portocarero (EGP) class schema (Arum & Mueller 2004: 9). This recognises that self-employment is not a homogeneous category but is strongly differentiated by occupation (VandenHeuvel & Wooden 1997). We also distinguish between self-identified full-time and part-time workers within the private and government sectors of employment. The proportion of part-time private sector workers is closely related to casual employment i.e. "employment without leave entitlements". In Australia 70% of employees without leave entitlements work part-time and 89% of employees without leave entitlements self-identify as casuals (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2004: 14).