The Maslach Burnout Inventory is a tool utilized to quantify the three theoretical components of burnout syndrome: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and personal achievement. The inventory is presented as a list of 22 statements about personal attitudes or feelings, such as”I’m burned out from my work.” This inventory’s recipients express the frequency with which they experience emotions. Confirmatory factor analysis is a tool analysts and scientists use to test the validity of theories. The Maslach Burnout Inventory has been analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis to test both its usefulness as a predictor of burnout and its inherent assumption that burnout has three main components.
Validity
Confirmatory factor analysis can be used to test the propositions of an idea. It statistically analyzes the correlation between a problem and its assumed solution by measuring the number of”correct answers” available. If a problem has several great solutions, the problem is considered unidentified since it does not have a single best solution. Studies using confirmatory factor analysis have always proven that Maslach Burnout Inventory is a useful instrument in the identification of burnout syndrome. On the other hand, the analysis of Maslach Burnout Inventory’s premise of three main components of burnout syndrome is inconclusive.
Three-Dimensional Construction
The basic premise of the Malsach Burnout Inventory is that burnout is triggered by three main variables: exhaustion, depersonalization and personal accomplishment. Depersonalization is a psychological term that refers to feelings of loss of personal identity and of being an anonymous cog within an impersonal social machine. Several studies, including research completed on teachers in Queensland, Australia by the Australian Catholic University, have performed positive confirmatory factor analysis on the three-dimensional nature of burnout.
Two-Dimensional Construction
Other studies using factor analysis of the Maslach Burnout Inventory indicate a arrangement to burnout: exhaustion and depersonalization. By way of example, a research on Greek midwives by Michael Galanakis at the Panteion University of Political and Social Sciences, using the Maslach Burnout Inventory, revealed only two variables: psychological exhaustion–as a main factor–and depersonalization.
