The Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey: Validation across different occupational groups in Poland

Abstract

This paper concerns the psychometric evaluation of the Polish version of a self-report questionnaire to measure burnout. Although the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) is the most commonly employed measure of burnout, researchers have been troubled by some of its psychometric limitations. The aim of this study is to examine the MBI-GS factor structure in three occupational groups (both within the human services sector and elsewhere), and to evaluate its reliability (internal consistency). In evaluating factorial validity, we carried out an explanatory analysis and a number of confrmatory analyses (using the total database and the three occupational groups). An additional aim was to explore the relationships between biographic characteristics (gender, age, work experience, employment level, and occupation) and burnout. The results of the confrmatory analyses show us that all three models ft the data almost acceptably, both in the total sample (N=998) and in the separate occupational groups, and that the ft of the three-factor solution appears to be somewhat better than that of the one- and two-factor solutions. When the initial model failed to ft the data well, we had to eliminate two items with weak reliability. The results then confrmed the factorial validity of the MBI-GS—as expected, the MBI-GS consists of three scales that are moderately correlate. © 2011, Versita. All rights reserved.