Prevalence of Burnout in Pastoral Ministry among Catholic Religious Men and Women of Mbarara Archdiocese in Uganda

Burnout in pastoral ministry is increasingly becoming an issue of concern among helping professionals. It is generally associated with certain emotional and psychological symptoms that may arise in the context of work stress. However, there are minimal studies with Catholic religious men and women. Therefore, the current study had two objectives: to examine the prevalence of burnout in pastoral ministry among Catholic religious men and women in Mbarara Archdiocese in Uganda; and to establish burnout prevalence in different years of pastoral ministry among Catholic religious men and women in Mbarara Archdiocese in Uganda. The study adopted a mixed method explanatory sequential design. The target population of the study was 280 Religious men and women. Through proportionate stratified random sampling, a sample size of 165 participants was selected. Purposive sampling was utilized to select 10 participants for the qualitative strand. Data was collected using Questionnaires and In-depth Interview Guide. The quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics with IBM SPSS version 21 application software and the qualitative data was analyzed using thematic analysis. The findings of the study show that most religious men and women in Mbarara Archdiocese have moderate levels of burnout. However, the fact that there are those with higher levels of both emotional exhaustion (n=15; 10.6%) and depersonalization (n=31; 21.8%) coupled with lower levels of personal accomplishment (n=53; 37.3%) could not be under looked. On regard to burnout prevalence in different years in ministry, the result indicated that those religious between 5-10 years of ministering scored low on personal accomplishment (M=1.1395) and scored high on both emotional exhaustion (M=2.4186) and depersonalization (M = 2.7805) compared to the rest of the other groups.