Investigating the Factors Affecting Academic Burnout from the Viewpoints of Students and Faculty Members

Academic burnout creates feelings of helplessness, irritability, and disappointment in students, which subsequently dwindles away their motivation, performance and academic achievement. Therefore, it is very important to identify the contributing factors on students’ academic burnout in order to provide strategies and solutions for reducing them. The objective of this study is to investigating the factors affecting academic burnout among students of state-run universities in Iran’s higher education system. In this study, qualitative method of content analysis was used. The population of the study was comprised of two main groups (students and professors) of the state universities of Iran in 2017, which were identified by snowball sampling method. After two semi-structured group interviews with students (21 persons) and professors (10 people) and 6 individual interviews with professors and 14 individual interviews with students of the country's higher education system, including 31 provinces in 1396, data saturation achieved. Obtained data were coded and classified by using conventional content analysis. The results of the research showed that the main components of the conceptual model of the contributing factors on academic burnout of the students are: inefficiency of education, cultural factors, scientific fraud, education economics, family problems, academic and behavioral weaknesses of faculty, infrastructure problems were supportive-motivational factors and personality traits. The findings of this study provide good results for helping policymakers, planners and educators of Iran's higher education system to reduce academic burnout among students.