A longitudinal examination of the relationship between teacher burnout and depression

Abstract

This study investigates the longitudinal relationships between burnout and depression among teachers. Middle and high school teachers participated in a 3-wave survey. The results of the latent growth modeling analysis revealed that there was a significant relationship between the initial status of burnout and the initial status of depression. Results also indicated a significant relationship between the change rate of burnout and the change rate of depression. Moreover, the autoregressive cross-lagged modeling revealed a causal relationship such that teacher's burnout leads to subsequent depression symptoms, not vice versa.