Elsevier

Journal of Adolescence

Volume 86, January 2021, Pages 77-89
Journal of Adolescence

School burnout and psychosocial problems among adolescents: Grit as a resilience factor

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.2020.12.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Introduction

The present study investigated whether grit can mitigate the associations between school burnout, loneliness, and depressive symptoms among adolescents. It also examined gender differences.

Methods

This study included 1296 seventh and 1166 eighth graders from Finland. The study variables were self-reported and regression analysis was performed.

Results

This study found that two grit facets – consistency of interest and perseverance of effort – played resilient roles in school burnout. A high level of grit substantially reduced reported depressive symptoms when adolescents experienced high school burnout. Our further analysis showed that the role of grit was more pronounced among boys than among girls. When male adolescents were at risk of school burnout, both consistency of interest and perseverance of effort protected them and they had only low levels of loneliness and depressive symptoms.

Conclusions

This study demonstrates that grit can act as a resilience factor among adolescents.

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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