Identification Environment, School Identification and School Burnout: Multilevel Models

Most research on well-being in social psychology has focused on individuals. Based on the social identity approach to health, we examined how the average strength of social identification within a group—a measure of the ‘identification environment’—affects group members’ burnout symptoms and moderates the association between their social identification and burnout. We analysed these issues using two samples of lower-secondary-school-age learners (2017: N = 678 schools, 71,392 learners; 2019: N = 704 schools, 85,989 learners). In both years, decreased school identification (i.e., individual level) and weaker identification environment (i.e., group level) were related to increased school burnout. At the individual level, the associations were curvilinear. Furthermore, the identification environment moderated this association in 2019. Our findings underline the importance of the identification environment for well-being and highlight that the social cure process operates at the group level, with the identification environment seemingly protecting against burnout over and above individual school identification.