Measurement Of Burnout: A Review

The importance of reliable and valid instruments to measure burnout is evident not only for the purpose of empirical research but ultimately for individual assessment. This chapter presents a comprehensive overview of measures that have been employed to assess burnout. Several psychometric criteria are used for assessing the various measures, such as inter-item reliability, test-retest consistency, and complexity of the factor structure. Self-report burnout measures can be distinguished according to the amount of psychometric research on which they are based. Two self-report instruments have been intensively studied psychometrically: Burnout Measure (BM) and Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI). The psychometric qualities of the MBI are encouraging but not completely beyond question. In particular, its discriminant validity is rather poor. In most self-report inventories the individual's depletion of emotional resources is included in one way or another. The chapter also discusses the directions for future research.