Correlation Between Burnout and Musculoskeletal Pain in Architecture Students

Abstract

Background- Architecture as a curriculum requires immense physical skills and deep creative thinking from the student to cater to the course’s demands. The work given to the students is physically and mentally exhausting. It can be postulated that this exhaustion may primarily be attributable to burnout. Burnout is a result of long-term involvement in intense workload and assignments, leading to mental drainage and loss of productivity. With respect to the execution of the assignments and projects, the students assume awkward faulty postures and work by using repetitive fine motor skills, giving rise to musculoskeletal pain. Burnout and musculoskeletal pain are prevalent among architecture students, and it is pertinent to think that there can be a possibility of a correlation between the two. Aim and objectives- To correlate burnout and musculoskeletal pain in architecture students. Method- This study included 60 architecture students as per the inclusion and exclusion criteria. All the subjects were provided with two scales, Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI) to assess burnout and the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) to assess musculoskeletal pain. The results were calculated by correlating the scores of both scales. Results- Statistical analysis showed a positive correlation between burnout and musculoskeletal pain. (P value – 0.000231, R value – 0.458) and the most commonly affected regions were Low back (70.3%), Head and neck (34.3 %), Right wrist (28.1%) and Right shoulder (6.4%). Conclusion- The results showed a high prevalence of burnout and MSP in architecture students, and there was a strong positive correlation between them. Keywords: Musculoskeletal Pain, Burnout, Architecture students