Stress and its impact on the health and well-being of individuals has been a focus of research for approximately 30 years. More recently there has been an interest in studying job stress and its consequences. Research has indicated that it is particularly stressful to work as a professional in the helping fields.

This investigation was an attempt to measure a type of stress called burnout in a new setting and with two new populations. Burnout was studied in paraprofessionals and nonprofessionals, i.e., licensed practical nurses and nurses' aides, employed in geriatric skilled care facilities. Additionally, psychosocial variables which were thought to moderate or exacerbate the effects of burnout were also studied. These included social support, religiosity, alienation, and length of service in the nursing field.

Sixty-nine nurses' aides and eighteen licensed practical nurses completed the following five questionnaires: the Staff Burnout Scale for Health Professionals (SBS-HP) (Jones, 1980), The Alienation Test (Maddi, Kobasa, & Hoover, 1979), the Gladdings, Lewis and Adkins Scale of Religiosity (1979), the Work Relationships Index (Holahan & Moos, 1981), and a demographic questionnaire. The hypotheses were tested through the use of Pearson Product correlations and one way analyses of variance. The large N for the nurses' aides also permitted the use of discriminant analysis and several analyses of covariance.

The results of the tests of the hypotheses revealed that the total alienation score on The Alienation Test accounted for 30% of the variance for licensed practical nurses and 17% of the variance for nurses' aides. Social support, in the form of work support, correlated significantly with low levels of burnout for licensed practical nurses. Work support was only minimally related to the degree of burnout reported by nurses' aides. Religiosity and length of service in the field of nursing appeared to have little or no relationship to the amount of burnout reported by both nurses' aides and licensed practical nurses.