School burnout and psychosocial problems among adolescents: Grit as a resilience factor
Section snippets
Resilience, risk and adaptation
The study of resilience dates back over 50 years when a puzzling but encouraging phenomenon emerged: some children who grow up in an adverse environments adapt well later on (Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Masten & Cicchetti, 2016). Understanding the mechanism behind this phenomenon is intuitively important as it may help thousands of children at risk to recover from adverse events/environments and eventually function well. There are different assumptions regarding the role of resilience in
Methods
The sample in the present study was from the Finnish Mind-the-Gap longitudinal study (2013–2016; 6th grade-9th grade). It consisted of 1296 Finnish adolescents (56.4% female) in the 7th grade and 1166 students (57.4% female) in the 8th grade. Most key variables used in this study (e.g., grit, burnout, loneliness and depressive symptoms) were from the 8th grade, as grit was first included in the project in the 8th grade. However, we included the 7th grade loneliness and depressive symptoms as
Results
The measurement model was conducted before the test of the structure model, to assess factor structure and inter-correlations among all the variables included in this study. The mean scores, standard deviations, and the correlations between the latent variables are listed in Table 1. The measurement model provided a good fit, χ2 (1205) = 3676.04, p < .001, CFI = 0.92, TLI = 0.91, RMSEA = 0.03. The sizes of all the factor loadings, ranging from 0.43 to 0.88, were acceptable. As shown in Table 1,
Discussion
School burnout has been found to be one of the most prominent risk factors leading to adolescents having mental health problems and dropping out of school (Bask & Salmela-Aro, 2013; Salmela-Aro, Savolainen, & Holopainen, 2009). By characterizing burnout as exhaustion, cynicism and inadequacy, the present study found that these three indicators were consistently associated with a high level of loneliness and depressive symptoms. These effects held even after gender, social economic status, prior
Acknowledgement
The study has been supported by the Academy of Finland Grants 263328 Mind-the-Gap, 308351 Bridging the Gaps, which are awarded to Katariina Salmela-Aro. The authors have been supported by Business Finland, AI in learning project.
The authors thank Sanna Tuovinen for her comments and intellectual contributions to the earlier draft of the manuscript, and thank Anne Lakkavaara for her comments to the earlier draft of the manuscript.
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