Understanding and Preventing Compassion Fatigue Among Principals During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Supporting the Well-Being of School Community During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Perspectives From Different School Stakeholders

Abstract

1) Objectives
The pandemic has dramatically reshaped school leadership and practice. School principals were challenged to lead their schools through their computers and restructure ways of connecting with learners and supporting the wellbeing of students and teachers (Harris, 2020). School principals often prioritize others' wellbeing before theirs (Harris & Jones, 2020), leaving their wellbeing unexamined. This study aimed to understand principals' perception and experience with compassion fatigue during the pandemic and how it was influenced concurrently and interactively by their perceptions of professional support, the efficacy of school improvement at individual and district level, with the control of for individual and school-level demographic factors.

2) Theoretical Framework
The study was grounded in the framework of the job demands-resources model (JD-R, Bakker & Demerouti 2017) and social cognitive theory (Bandura, 2001). Their job demands and resources influenced principals' occupational wellbeing through influencing their motivational process and health impairment process (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007, 2017). The social cognitive theory posits that individuals’ beliefs (i.e. efficacy) play a role in affecting the effectiveness of their stress management (Bandura, 1997; Benight & Bandura, 2004). While these two theoretical frameworks have been applied to understand educators' wellbeing, their applications to understand and support school leaders' wellbeing are understudied.

3) Methods and data analysis procedure
This study was part of the two-wave longitudinal survey study. Participants were 230 practicing public school principals recruited from 24 counties representing every geographic region in California in the spring of 2021 after IRB approval. Participants were asked to complete an online survey about their experience during the pandemic, including their perceptions of professional support, self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and compassion fatigue in addition to individual and school-level demographic information. All the measures were structurally validated, followed by five hierarchical sets of linear regression model analyses using STATA, in which all independent variables were grand-mean centered.

4) Results
Among all demographic variables, gender is the only significant factor that predicted principals’ compassion fatigue. Male principals reported significantly higher compassion fatigue than female principals. Controlling for demographic factors, professional support is significantly negatively associated with compassion fatigue. Collective efficacy also significantly negatively predicted compassion fatigue. However, neither self-efficacy nor the interaction between collective and self-efficacy is significantly associated with compassion fatigue. Both collective efficacy and self-efficacy moderated the relationship between professional support and compassion fatigue. Specifically, principals who perceived higher district level and school-level effectiveness for school improvement were less attuned to the protective role of professional help.

5) Scientific Significance
Our findings highlight the importance of improving professional support and promoting district-level collective efficacy in protecting school principals from compassion fatigue during the pandemic. The results also provide a nuanced understanding of the role of principal self-efficacy in preventing compassion fatigue. Findings from the study support the need to attend to issues of principal resilience in research, policy, and practice.

Authors

• Xueqin Lin, University of California - Berkeley

• Rebecca Cheung, University of California - Berkeley

• Meg Stomski, University of California - Berkeley

• Hua Luo, University of California - Berkeley

• Chunyan Yang, University of California, Berkeley