Burnout Among Pastors in Guatemala and the United States: A Quantitative Study

Burnout Among Pastors in Guatemala and the United States: A Quantitative Study

Benjamin Louis Stoffel | 2022

Abstract

Pastors experience burnout, and there are still unexplored factors that could impact pastoral burnout. Upon examining the literature, no research was discovered that tested burnout between pastors in two countries. I conducted this quantitative study to advance the extant literature by testing for differences in burnout scores between pastors in two different countries—Guatemala and the United States. I tested for burnout as defined by the three factors in the Maslach Burnout Inventory: (a) personal exhaustion, (b) depersonalization, and (c) personal achievement. I implemented a cross-sectional design using a t-test to determine if there were differences in the pastor’s self-scoring of the three variables from the MBI across the two national groupings of pastors. I successfully collected data through an online survey of the MBI from 180 respondents: 89 Protestant pastors from Guatemala and 91 Protestant pastors from the United States. The results showed that personal accomplishment scores varied significantly by country, even though there was no significant difference in emotional exhaustion or depersonalization scores.