Summary

The reciprocal and longitudinal effects of job burnout and perceived health were examined in a sample of Air Force personnel (N = 1,009) deployed to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and sup-porting locations. We estimated a structural equation model that described the relationships between the job burnout and perceived health and their effects on each other over time. The data fi t the model exceedingly well as demonstrated by the goodness of fi t measures (normed fi t index, non-normed fi t index, comparative fi t index = 0.97, 0.99, 0.99, respectively, and root mean square error of approximation = 0.01). As hypothesized, burnout and perceived health are negatively associated with each other (r =-0.33). Over a one-year follow-up period, perceived health pre-dicted a decrease in job burnout (b =-0.20) and job burnout predicted a decrease in perceived health (b =-0.10). The predicted effect of perceived health on job burnout was shown to be signifi cantly larger than the effect of burnout on health. This latter fi nding is interpreted to result from the conceptualization and measurement of job burnout as limited to a single life domain and also to the possibility that job burnout fl uctuates with changing working conditions over time more than perceived health. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key Word