ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Occupational Health and Safety
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1633952
This article is part of the Research TopicEducator Burnout – Improving the Understanding of Challenges and Advancing Insights for Interventions and PreventionView all 4 articles
Untangling teacher burnout: A network analysis of demands, resources, and out-of-field teaching challenges in rural China
Provisionally accepted
- Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China
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Teacher burnout poses a significant threat to the sustainability of rural education. However, the effect of out-of-field teaching as a job demand remains understudied. This research applies the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model to explore how job demands, job resources, and personal resources interact with burnout among rural teachers. We conducted a network analysis on survey data from 2,475 English teachers in rural China (2,119 in-field and 356 out-of-field) to examine these relationships. Our findings revealed that emotional exhaustion emerged as the central burnout dimension, with workload stress acting as the primary bridge connecting JD-R variables to burnout. Job satisfaction showed strong negative bridge effects, suggesting that it is associated with lower depersonalization. The network structure and strength were similar for in-field and out-of-field teachers, indicating that out-of-field teaching may not be directly associated with teacher burnout. These findings suggest that interventions targeting workload reduction and enhancing professional identity and recognition could alleviate burnout and support sustainable rural education in China.
Keywords: burnout, job demands-resources, Network analysis, in-field teachers, Out-of-field teachers
Received: 26 May 2025; Accepted: 08 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Huo. 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: Ming Huo, Northeast Normal University, Changchun, China
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