Background and aim: Job burnout has been recognized as a serious occupational hazard among
professionals, such as health care professionals. The sense of coherence (SoC) is deemed to be a personal
resource capable of reducing the impact of job stressors and, consequently, the experience of job burnout. The
purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between SoC and job burnout among speech and
language therapists. Materials and methods: A descriptive and cross-sectional analysis was carried out through
an online self-reported questionnaire. A total of 217 Italian speech and language therapists were involved
in the study. The Anova test, T-test and logistic regression were performed to study the association between
SoC and job burnout. Results: The Anova test showed that job tenure was not associated to job burnout. The
T-test showed that speech and language therapists having a low SoC exhibited significantly higher emotional
exhaustion, higher cynicism, and lower professional efficacy (t=-7.190 d.f.=215 p<.001) when compared to
those having a high SoC. Finally, the odds ratio showed that low SoC was associated with high emotional
exhaustion (OR=11.86; 95% CI=5.52-25.49; p<0.05), low SoC was associated with high cynicism (OR=4.41,
CI=2.50-7.80; p<0.05), and low SoC was associated with low personal efficacy (OR=4.70; CI=2.59-8.52;
p<0.05). Conclusion: Our results are in line with previous studies which showed that SoC is a fundamental
personal resource which may activate workers’ reaction to various stressors, thus reducing the experience of
burnout. (www.actabiomedica.it