No burnout for College of Doctoral Studies' Dissertation of the Year recipient

Photos by Ralph Freso

Dr. Lauren Walsh became interested in the causes of job burnout among athletic trainers as an undergraduate student.

Then she experienced it firsthand as a high school trainer who also taught sports medicine classes. Her workweek sometimes exceeded 80 hours.

Walsh ended up quitting her job and transitioned to a corporate health care position that allowed her to return to a semblance of a normal life while gradually regaining the “cognitive capacity,” she said, to pursue her doctorate in performance psychology at Grand Canyon University.

The combination of real-life experiences, a passion to represent those affected by burnout, and a spouse who carried increased parental responsibilities enabled Walsh to fulfill a goal that started more than 16 years ago.

After successfully defending her dissertation, Walsh’s work was recognized by the College of Doctoral Studies as its 2025 Dissertation of the Year.

“It makes me proud because I can turn to my girls and say, ‘You can do hard things,’" said Walsh, an adjunct professor at GCU and the mother of two young daughters.

Walsh’s dissertation, titled “Moderate Leadership Predictive Burnout in Athletic Trainers: The Effects of Self-Efficacy and Supervisory Credentials,” delved into a spectrum of reasons for burnout.

Before her doctoral journey, Walsh worked with high school and college athletes, as well as Olympians. She saw trainers who were working during their" off-season,” sometimes traveling to Europe to watch a potential player acquisition. She also witnessed the chain of command that trainers are subject to and can lead to “moral injury.”

In addressing a pressing concern in the industry and providing valuable insight to the academic conversation, Walsh employed an advanced statistical technique known as conditional process analysis.

“Notably, this procedure is not part of the standard curriculum at GCU, which meant Lauren undertook substantial independent learning to master it,” dissertation chair Dr. Nancy Bridier said. “Her willingness to pursue challenging methods and her commitment to making a meaningful contribution to the discipline are evident throughout her dissertation.”

Trainers are sometimes expected to attend every athletic event, which can lead to exhaustion because of how many hours they work and the number of athletes they treat.

And when the focus of an athletic department is to win and win, “that contradicts what your focus is, or it's incongruent to your focus of ‘Well, maybe I need to hold the starter out because he or she or they are unhealthy,’" Walsh said. “So we know all of that leads to it.”

There’s also a wide gulf among high school trainers, with the majority leaving in less than five years and others who serve 30 years or more. “My study was the first that we could find in the athletic training profession looking at self-efficacy, which is how strongly you believe that you can do hard things, you can persevere and overcome,” Walsh said. “And in certain situations, we found that it buffered or influenced the burnout experience.”

Also, now a medical model is in use, as opposed to the past, when the athletic trainer was supervised by the high school athletic director. Walsh noticed that more high school districts are employing a district athletic trainer or health care provider, “which kind of loops back into that self-efficacy ... now they have somebody who knows what they're going through and has that educational background. So we looked at that also to see how that influenced.”

Walsh conducted a quantitative study, which helps doctoral learners avoid research bias. And “to further safeguard the integrity of her research and maintain ongoing motivation, Lauren met with me biweekly for debriefings,” Bridier said. “These regular meetings were crucial, as the dissertation process can easily lead to disengagement, especially when learners face significant obstacles during their research.”

One of the biggest hurdles that Walsh cleared convincingly was successfully completing her dissertation process within a year. She credits her husband, Ryan, for taking on more parental and household responsibilities while she often woke up at 5:15 a.m. to prepare her two young daughters before leaving for work at the Barlow Neurological Institute as a program manager and program coordinator.

Walsh studied during her lunch breaks and resumee them after her husband served dinner. She would sustain herself on sparkling water and snacks while studying past midnight on most nights. She attended her first dissertation course on July 25, 2024, and College of Doctoral Studies Dean Dr. Michael Berger signed her papers on April 11, 2025.

“I am not aware of any other learners who have finished their dissertation in so short a timeframe,” said Bridier, marveling at Walsh’s achievement while managing her employment and family obligations and acknowledging the assistance provided by her spouse.

“Lauren is among the most determined and persistent learners I have ever mentored. The final product of her efforts is a dissertation totaling 421 pages, an extraordinary length for a quantitative study. This level of detail is virtually unheard of in such work and powerfully demonstrates Lauren’s meticulousness and the thoroughness of her analysis throughout the research process.”

GCU News senior writer Mark Gonzales can be reached at Mark.Gonzales.gcu.edu

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