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Occupational stress and burnout of judges and procurators

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Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to examine the associations between occupational stress and burnout among judges and procurators.

Methods

The Chinese versions of the job content questionnaire (JCQ), Siegrist’s effort–reward imbalance questionnaire (ERI), and the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) were administered to examine occupational stress and personal, work-related, and client-related burnout among 211 judicial officers, comprising 87 judges and 98 procurators, in Taiwan. Logistic regression was applied to determine the association between burnout and occupational stress among judges and procurators, adjusting for potential confounders of age, gender, marriage, number of children, work experience, working hours, and the significant occupational stress scale of each model for the other.

Results

The judicial officers with average age of 36.84 years and work experience of 8.57 years had high averaging scores of job control (70.31), psychological demand (32.23), effort (18.98), reward (48.37), and overcommitment (17.04) as well as personal (49.97), work-related (51.36), and client-related (43.57) burnout. The high psychological demand, effort, and overcommitment were significantly associated with both personal and work-related burnout, while the low workplace social support was significantly associated with client-related burnout among the judicial officers. The judges had a significant higher risk of client-related burnout than the procurators.

Conclusions

In general, occupational stress was associated with personal and work-related burnout for both judges and prosecutors. Client-related burnout was more common for judicial officers with low social support and the judges.

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Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Correspondence to Chang-Chuan Chan.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 Independent association between burnout and occupational stress and by logistic regression analyses
Table 5 Association between burnout and occupational stress after combine models by logistic regression analyses

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Tsai, FJ., Chan, CC. Occupational stress and burnout of judges and procurators. Int Arch Occup Environ Health 83, 133–142 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00420-009-0454-1

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