Compassion Fatigue, Psychological Flexibility and Burnout among ABA Professionals

Abstract

The current study sought to investigate the relationship between the three variables of compassion fatigue, psychological flexibility and burnout among ABA therapists working with children with special needs in Lahore, with the mediating role of psychological flexibility in the relationship of compassion fatigue and burnout. The research used a quantitative correlational research design with a sample of 250 ABA therapists obtained by purposive sampling from different ABA clinics, therapy centers, hospitals, and special education institutes in Lahore. The research instruments used included the Secondary Traumatic Stress subscale of the Professional Quality of Life Scale (ProQOL-5; Stamm, 2010), the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II (AAQ-II; Bond et al. 2011) and the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT; Schaufeli, Desart & De Witte, 2020). Results showed reliability of all three scales with a Chronbach's alpha coefficient of.918,.910 and.959 respectively. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, multiple linear regression and mediation analysis was conducted using PROCESS Macro Model 4 (Hayes, 2018). Results revealed that compassionate fatigue was A lot and positively correlated with burnout (r =.653, p <.01), and psychological inflexibility was Quite a bit and positively correlated with burnout (r =.564, p <.01). The two variables jointly together A lot predicted burnout, accounting for 58.2% of its variability (F(2, 247) = 172.15, p <.001). Mediation analysis established a mediating role of psychological flexibility in the relationship between compassion fatigue and burnout (ab = 0.254, 95% CI [0.142, 0.377]). This highlights the important role that psychological flexibility has in reducing burnout caused by compassion fatigue.