Examining school engagement, school burnout, and mental health among adolescents in public schools

Introduction Adolescence is a critical developmental period marked by heightened environmental stressors, particularly among students in economically disadvantaged students contexts. Prior research has typically evaluated school engagement, school burnout, and mental health in isolation or in dyadic pairs. Drawing on an ecological framework and combined with a strength-based, approach multi-systemic framework perspective, this study modeled all three constructs in parallel among economically disadvantaged adolescents attending public secondary schools in Lebanon, a lower-middle-income country marked by economic instability. Methods Data were collected in 2025 from 1,615 adolescents (14–18 years, M = 16.71, SD = 1.07; 56.7% girls, 43.3% boys) recruited from 10 public secondary schools in Lebanon, who completed paper-and-pencil self-report questionnaires administered in classrooms. This cross-sectional study applied structural equation modeling within a multiple indicators multiple causes (MIMIC) framework: confirmatory factor analyses established three-factor measurement models for each construct (CFI ≥ 0.916–0.950), followed by structural models testing associations with age, gender, governorate, parental occupation, parental education, and family economic status. Results Individual and social factors were associated with the constructs adjustment divergently rather than uniformly across domains. Social factors (family economic status) were the most consistent predictors across the three domains. Gender showed the strongest associations: lower cognitive engagement (b = −307, p < 0.001) and lower schoolwork exhaustion (b = −0.371, p < 0.001) among boys. For mental health, both governorate and family economic status significantly predicted all three dimensions of well-being. The strongest association across all models was between governorate and psychological well-being (b = 0.411, p < 0.001). Discussion School engagement, burnout, and mental health responded to distinct, sometimes opposing, individual and social factors rather than a shared set of protective factors, supporting gender-sensitive, domain-specific interventions over uniform approaches in economically disadvantaged, crisis-affected school contexts. Notably, the strongest association observed across the models was a social predictor, with governorate showing the largest coefficient in relation to psychological well-being.