The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 1 - 40

James C . Stoner

is, there is no measurable difference in the personal accomplishment felt by male and female
RAs. Although not recommended by the
authors who developed the MBI instrument
(Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996), Fuehrer
and McGonagle (1988) presented this variable
as lack of personal accomplishment. Neglecting to describe the computations and interpretations that lead to the modified personal
accomplishment variable makes it difficult to
ascertain if this may be the root cause of the
differences between the two studies.
Finally, this study reports findings consistent with those of previously published
research presenting a lack of statistically significant differences between male and female
RAs in the burnout dimension of depersonalization (Fuehrer & McGonagle, 1988; Hardy
& Dodd, 1998; Hetherington et al., 1989).
Overall, the results of this study suggest that
practitioners should not focus on developing
gender-specific interventions to reduce RA
burnout. According to the current research,
practitioners should pursue a more holistic
approach.
Comparing these findings to those of previous research on the levels of burnout experienced by RAs based on their community
composition is difficult and warrants a cautious approach. As demonstrated, the literature often defines community composition in
various ways; however, despite these different
definitions, inferences can be made by assuming that first-year halls comprise individual
first-year floors. Keeping this caveat in mind,
this study supports most of the previous findings in the emotional exhaustion dimension.
The only significant finding related to burnout
dimensions between community composi40

tion groups was that RAs who worked with
communities composed of a balanced mix of
first-year students and upper-division students
reported significantly higher levels of personal
accomplishment compared to RAs working
predominately with first-year students.
When cautiously compared to previous
research, the results of this study contradict
the reported differences in burnout dimension levels between community composition
groups: emotional exhaustion (Benedict &
Mondloch, 1989), depersonalization (Hardy
& Dodd, 1998), and personal accomplishment
(Fuehrer & McGonagle, 1988). The obvious
rationale for the different results is that each
study's definition of community composition
is different. To address this discrepancy, future
research may transform the community composition variable in this study to more closely
mirror Hardy and Dodd's (1998) by combining both "mostly upper-division" and "a balanced mix of first-year and upper-division" to
represent "non-first-year" communities, which
may reveal different results. While this warrants further investigation, the means of the
two variables included in the suggested transformation split the "mostly first-year" variable:
RAs with "a balanced mix" reported the lowest
means, followed by "mostly first-year" and then
"mostly upper-division," with no significant
differences between any of the groups. Thus,
the resulting transformed variable would likely
still yield no difference in outcome.
One hypothesis for why RAs who work in
communities with a balanced mix of student
classifications report higher levels of personal
accomplishment is that the needs of each subgroup (first-year and upper-division) differ. As
both groups are typically at different devel-

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 1

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