BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
This article is part of the Research TopicMental Health Challenges in Vulnerable Groups: Psychological Well-Being, Learning, and Support in Disadvantaged ContextsView all 19 articles
The impact of discrimination perception on academic burnout of junior college students: The mediating role of belief in a just world and the moderating effect of sense of family obligation
Provisionally accepted
- Shandong Normal University, Jinan, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Within the context of higher education stratification, junior college students are more likely to experience unfair treatment based on their academic credentials during their studies and in societal evaluations. This pressure may impact their academic engagement, educational quality, and long-term development. Based on the student needs-resources process framework, this study views academic burnout as a process outcome gradually formed under the dual pressures of continuous learning demands and resource depletion. Using structural equation modeling, it examines the relationships and underlying mechanisms among perceived of discrimination, belief in a just world , sense of family obligation, and academic burnout among junior college students from the perspectives of social structural pressures and their psychological mechanisms. The research results show that perception of discrimination has a significant positive predictive effect on academic burnout. Belief in a just world plays a partial mediating role between perception of discrimination and academic burnout. Among them, perception of discrimination significantly negatively predicts belief in a just world, and belief in a just world significantly negatively predicts academic burnout. Furthermore, sense of family obligation exerted a significant negative moderating effect on the relationship between perceived discrimination and academic burnout, while also negatively moderating the relationship between perceived discrimination and the belief in a just world. This study, framed within the demand-resource and meaning systems perspectives, elucidates the psychological mechanisms through which perceived discrimination influences academic burnout among junior college students. It offers empirical insights for improving educational quality and fostering holistic student development in stratified contexts.
Keywords: Academic burnout, Belief in a just world, Discrimination perception, familyobligation, junior college students
Received: 25 Oct 2025; Accepted: 30 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Du, Yan, Zhang, Lv and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Xiaomin Lv
Maocong Zhang
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.