Emotional exhaustion, or burnout, is a significant problem for people with careers in the ficld of human services. Regression analysis was used to investigate the relationship between burnout and aspects of the human services professional's job and job-related behavlor

(Journal ofApplied Behavioral Science, Vol. 22, 1986).

Emotional exhaustion was measured with the Maslach Burnout Inventory, a questionnaire. One of the independent variables considered, called concentration, was the proportion of social contacts with individuals who belong to a person's work group.The table below lists the values of the emotional exhaustion index (higher values indicate greater exhaustion) and concentration for a sample of 25 human services professionals who work in a large public hospital. An SPSS printout of the simple linear regression is also provided on page 547.

a. Construct a scattergram for the data. Do the variables x and y appear to be related?

b. Find the correlation coefficient for the data and interpret its value. Does your conclusion mean that concentration causes emotional exhaustion? Explain.