Abstract
Academic burnout is a mental sub-health state in the learning process. When students cannot face the pressure of academic, they will feel frustrated, bored, tired, and then escape from study. As bi-cultural individuals in rural and urban areas, Chinese migrant children are under great pressure to integrate into the local environment. Studies have found that perceived personal and group discrimination have a great impact on the academic attitude and behavior of Chinese migrant children. In addition, academic self-handicapping may play a mediating role in the relationship between perceived personal and group discrimination and academic burnout of Chinese migrant children. Academic self-handicapping means students will adopt any behaviors and choices that can attribute failure to external causes to avoid the possibility of negative academic evaluation. When Chinese migrant children perceive discrimination, in order to protect their self-worth, they may adopt self-handicapping strategies to hinder learning, which increase the possibility of grades dropped, reduce the academic self-efficacy, and finally lead to academic burnout. Studies have suggested that a good identity integration has a positive impact on mental health status and social adaptability, and will promote the individual's academic performance. On the contrary, a bad identity integration has a negative impact on academic performance. Therefore, the identity integration may play a protective role in the relationship between perceived personal and group discrimination, academic self-handicapping and academic burnout of Chinese migrant children.
In view of the above, this study focuses on the mediating role of academic self-handicapping in the relationship between perceived personal and group discrimination and academic burnout, as well as the moderating role of identity integration. The aim is investigating the influence mechanism between perceived personal and group discrimination and academic burnout, which provides theoretical support for reducing academic burnout of Chinese migrant children, has a great practical significance.
In this study, 363 Chinese migrant children in junior middle school were selected as participants. After given informed consents, they completed a series of self-report inventories to measure their perceived personal and group discrimination, academic burnout, academic self-handicapping and integration of bi-cultural identity. Then we used the PROCESS macro for SPSS to examined common method biases, and tested the moderated mediation model. The results indicated that: (1) Perceived personal and group discrimination can significantly positively predict the academic burnout of Chinese migrant children; (2) Academic self-handicapping plays an mediating role in the relationship between perceived personal and group discrimination and academic burnout of Chinese migrant children; (3) Identity integration moderates the effects of perceived discrimination and academic self-handicapping on academic burnout, and for Chinese migrant children with high identity integration, perceived personal discrimination and academic self-handicapping have a greater impact on academic burnout.
Although high integration of bi-cultural identity makes Chinese migrant children who perceive personal discrimination and adopt academic self-handicapping strategies feeling more academic burnout, it also makes them attribute adverse outcomes to internal factors that can be changed, which is conducive to personality development. Therefore, educators should actively improve identity integration of migrant children when they feel academic burnout, effecting a permanent cure.
Key words
Chinese migrant children /
perceive discrimination /
academic burnout /
academic self-handicapping /
identity integration
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Yu-Han ZHAO.
Influence of perceived personal and group discrimination on academic burnout of Chinese migrant children: the mediating effect of academic self-handicapping and the moderating effect of the identity integration[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2021, 44(5): 1111-1118
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