| Many of Florida's child victims of abuse and neglect reside in foster group homes where they receive treatment and parenting from paraprofessional youth care workers. Stress is an unavoidable outcome for these workers and employee burnout a constant threat. The development of personal coping strategies is essential. The value of a sense of humor as a coping strategy in mitigating youth care worker stress and burnout was the focus of this study.;A 94-item questionnaire that included the Sense of Humor Questionnaire, the Occupational Coping Humor Scale, the Therapist Stress Scale (modified), and the Maslach Burnout Inventory was administered on-site to 456 full-time youth care workers, representing 47 randomly-selected residential group homes across Florida. Findings indicate a high level of humor recognition, with only a moderate tendency to select humor as a coping mechanism within these reported high stress work environments. Very little of the variance in coping humor was explained by demographics and work setting variables.;When examining stress and burnout, workers reporting less preference or ability to use humor in stressful situations appeared to experience greater levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. Those with a more highly developed use of coping humor reported lower job stress and a greater sense of personal accomplishment. Youth care worker stress seems to occur regardless of gender, age, educational level, tenure, work schedule, number of co-workers or clients. Employee cohesiveness appears to increase as overall stress increases.;The challenges and limitations of conducting this research underscored the need for updated and improved humor evaluation instruments. Test items assessing both recognition of humor and use of humor as a coping mechanism, need to be more theoretically-based, and relevant to the stress and burnout relationship. For future research, the correlational results should be followed up with an experimental study. If a connection is noted, humor development and use as a stress coping strategy should be considered for inclusion into staff training curricula. |
