Longitudinal relationships between school burnout, compulsive Internet use, and academic decrement: A three-wave cross-lagged study

This longitudinal investigation examined the relationships between school burnout, compulsive Internet use, and academic decrement related to middle school adolescents’ Internet use. The study tracked 1301 students from the seventh to ninth grades. We applied a cross-lagged panel model for the longitudinal data at three time points. The results indicated that elevated school burnout was significantly associated with later compulsive Internet use and academic decrement across the three years. Compulsive Internet use also had a predictive effect on academic decrement. These recursive patterns imply that students may overuse the Internet as a means to avoid an exhaustive school load and lower their perceptions of their academic performance. Moreover, higher academic decrement in the seventh grade was linked to increased school burnout and compulsive Internet use in the eighth grade; however, the link was not duplicate from the eighth to ninth grades. Academic decrement played an important role in the early period of the middle school by feeding back to burnout and Internet use. Finally, compulsive Internet use showed a direct effect on burnout from the eighth to ninth grades, but not in the earlier period. While burnout seems to always lead to compulsive Internet use, overuse of the Internet might fuel students’ school burnout only in the later period of middle school. This paper discusses different perspectives of Internet use to expand the understanding of Internet use by the digital native generation. • Analyzing longitudinal relations of school burnout, Internet use and achievement. • Elevated burnout predicted later compulsive Internet use, but not the reverse. • Overusing the Internet as a means to cope with exhaustive school load. • Excessive Internet use lowered students’ perceptions of academic performance. • Vicious cycles centered around academic decrement in the beginning and faded later.