Abstract

This study was conducted to identify profiles of loners and those likely to suffer academic burnout among middle school students and to determine whether these profiles differed by gender, ego-resilience, ego-weakness, and school adaptation. The participants in this study were 270 middle school students in Kyung-nam. The results showed that there were four main profiles of students related to their likelihood of being loners and suffering academic burnout: the adaptive group, which had a low tendency towards both loneliness and academic burnout; the burnout group, which had a high tendency towards academic burnout but a low tendency towards loneliness; the lonely group, which had a high tendency towards loneliness but a low tendency towards academic burnout; and the loner-burnout group, which had high tendencies towards both loneliness and academic burnout. Cross-tabulation and one-way ANOVA analyses of the four groups showed that the loneliness-burnout group had a statistically lower level of ego-resilience, higher level of ego-weakness, and lower level of school adaptation than the other groups. This paper discusses the implications for counseling middle school students and presents suggestions for future research.