How stable is student teachers’ emotional exhaustion?: Disentangling different components of stability and change using the STARTS model

Teachers’ emotional exhaustion is related to various detrimental outcomes, such as work absenteeism, intention to quit, impaired instructional quality, and lower student motivation. Since emotional exhaustion becomes evident as early as teacher training at university, the question is whether it would be possible to identify an individual disposition to this burnout symptom in student teachers. Accordingly, it is important to investigate its conceptual nature to gain a deeper understanding of the genesis, stability, and trajectories of change of emotional exhaustion. In the present study, we have disentangled different components of longitudinal stability in emotional exhaustion by applying STARTS models to two longitudinal samples of German student teachers (Sample 1: N = 4,510; Sample 2: N = 2,034). We found that completely stable sources (Sample 1: 35%; Sample 2: 37%) and slowly changing factors (Sample 1: 46%; Sample 2: 36%) in student teachers’ emotional exhaustion accounted for much of the total variance in inter-individual differences; time-specific factors accounted for the remaining variation (Sample 1: 23%; Sample 2: 30%). Our findings indicated that some of the inter-individual differences in emotional exhaustion that were rooted in stable sources, like early developmental experiences, remained stable over time. Simultaneously, much of the longitudinal variation between individuals can be ascribed to systematic changes over time (e.g., maturation processes), whereas time-specific factors, such as short-term life events and measurement error, explained a smaller proportion of variance. We discuss our results with regard to the implications for theory and practice in teacher education.