Teacher Victimization and Teacher Burnout: Multilevel Moderating Role of School Climate in a Large-scale Survey Study

ABSTRACT

Guided by the social-ecological model, the present study used hierarchical linear modeling to examine the multilevel associations between teacher victimization (TV), teacher burnout, and school climate. Participants were 1,711 teachers from 58 middle and high schools in mainland China. Using hierarchical linear modeling, the study found that upon controlling for teacher and school demographic factors, TV at the individual level had a significant and positive association with all three dimensions of teacher burnout (i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment). School climate at the teacher level, but not at the school level, was negatively associated with all three types of burnout. Moreover, school climate at the school level, but not at the teacher level, significantly moderated the association between TV and two dimensions of teacher burnout (i.e., depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment). More specifically, a positive school-level climate buffered the positive association between TV and depersonalization but magnified the positive association between TV and reduced personal accomplishment. The current findings highlight the importance of reducing teacher victimization and promoting a positive school climate for preventing teacher burnout and teacher retention. It also indicates that teacher’s adjustment in responding to teacher-targeted violence varies depending on school climate context and across the different dimensions of teacher burnout.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher victimization
• teacher burnout
• school climate
• multilevel analyses
• school violence

Supplementary Material:

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Jiashu Xie at School of Education, Hunan Normal University, China for her research team’s support in the data collection process of the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The response rate was calculated by dividing the number of teachers who responded to the survey by the total number of teachers in the school. Follow-up analyses indicated that response rates were not significantly different across school location (i.e., urban, rural, and suburban) and school type (i.e., public and private). They were also not significantly correlated with teacher victimization scores at school levels, with correlation coefficients ranging from −.13 to −.19.

2. The between-school variable of TV (TV_{school level}) was not calculated and included in the analysis of the present study because conceptually TV was measured as an individual construct. Moreover, the ICC of TV showed that the between-school variance of TV was very small.