Academic burnout and depression of Chinese medical students in the pre-clinical years: the buffering hypothesis of resilience and social support

ABSTRACT

The present study explored whether the two psychosocial resources including resilience and social support serve as moderating factors in the process between academic burnout and depression among medical students, and investigated factors that associated with depression. We applied Learning Burnout Scale of Undergraduates, Beck Depression Inventory-II, Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, and Social Support Rating Scale as tools for an investigation with 1722 Chinese medical students. Academic burnout positively correlated with depression while resilience and social support negatively related to depression. Hierarchical regression implied that resilience moderated burnout and depression while social support did not show a buffer effect between the same variables. Building resilience and enhancing their social support are essential for preventing depression in their college life. It is also worth noting that resilience can still work against depression even when academic burnout emerged.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• social support
• academic burnout
• depression
• Chinese medical students

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Jonathan Davidson and Kathryn Connor for providing the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant number 81872704.