Introduction: Research shows that the quality of life of French pupils deteriorates over the course of their schooling (e.g. Martin-Krumm et al., 2014). One consequence of this is that they become exhausted and their school life conditions deteriorate (Oger et al., 2020). The aim of this research is to transpose the JD-R model of Demerouti et al. (2001) in order to consider the balance between resources and demands as predictive of the quality of life of pupils. An adequate scale was first validated.
Method: 414 middle and high school students agreed to take part in an initial study aimed at validating a measurement tool to assess the level of demand and resources in the school environment. They were splitted into two samples of 207 participants devoted to the exploratory and confirmatory analyses.
Results: The overall results revealed a satisfactory construct validity for the 6-item scale. The exploratory analysis revealed a two-factor solution explaining 30,1% (resources) and 29,4% (demands) of the variance, with a = .80 and .79 respectively. The confirmatory analysis showed good fit to the data with c2 = 8.96, p=.41; CFI = .99; TLI = .99; SRMR = 0.040; RMSEA = 0.011; AIC = 4395.118; BIC = 4438.380.
Conclusion: The results revealed that the scale is psychometrically sound. Future studies will aim to put the two-dimensional model, demands and resources to the test. The aim will be to assess the extent to which it is a predictor of both student quality of life, satisfaction and engagement, and burnout.