Temporal relationships among role stress, staff burnout, and residents’ behavioral problems: A 2-year longitudinal study in child care homes in Hong Kong

Young residents in care homes experience psychological distress arising from their complex family backgrounds. Residential care workers face job demands and are prone to burnout due to the role stress of balancing enormous workloads with residents’ emotional needs. This 2-year study examined the changes in role stress, burnout, and residents’ behavioral problems, and their temporal relationships in a sample of 381 young residents and 76 workers from residential care homes in Hong Kong. The workers completed the Role Questionnaire and Copenhagen Burnout Inventory and evaluated the residents’ behavioral problems using the Child Behavior Checklist every 3 months. Latent growth modeling was used to analyze the temporal changes, and multilevel regression analysis was used to evaluate the associations between role stress and residents’ behavioral problems. The workers displayed stable trends in role stress and burnout with significant inter-individual variations in temporal changes. The residents’ total behavioral problems displayed piecewise decreasing trajectories with significant declines over the first 9 months. Controlling for baseline levels, changes in role stress showed significant and positive associations with changes in work burnout and total behavioral problems over the first 9 months. The findings provide support for the temporal relationships among role stress, work burnout, and residents’ behavioral problems in a residential care setting.