The Psych Student

"One Hundred and Sixty" by Stibbons

Most everyone knows what professional burnout feels like, but measuring it and describing it objectively seems to be an elusive goal, akin to describing the color blue to a blind person. Burnout is a part of my current job.

Not my own burnout¹ but professional burnout among educators, the people who Teacher Support Network² serve. Our online and telephone support services did help rekindle my interest in psychology and get me on the path back to school, and I tend to spend some time looking at new ways to bring tools to teachers to measure their own stress levels, work/life balance, etc., but how to best measure burnout overall? What’s the best method for people to assess themselves, and how can a school system best look at the burnout rate of its educators?

Google is the tool one employs to ask the universe for things³. It didn’t take much searching to find two dominant versions of burnout indication tools: The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory and The Maslach Burnout Inventory. We’ll get back to those soon. I’m currently working on a project for Scottish schools and local authorities to conduct online wellbeing assessments of their staff. A while back I spent some time searching around about how this sort of thing has been carried out elsewhere, and while perusing Google Scholar I came across Burnout and Wellbeing: Testing the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory in New Zealand Teachers⁴.

“Abstract: The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) is a public domain questionnaire measuring the degree of physical and psychological fatigue experienced in three sub-dimensions of burnout: personal, work-related, and client-related burnout. This study first examines the reliability and validity of the CBI in measuring burnout in New Zealand secondary school teachers, and then the relationship between burnout and wellbeing among this population. The CBI had acceptable reliability (internal consistency and homogeneity) as well as factorial and criterion-related validity. As expected, burnout was negatively related to wellbeing measures (wellbeing index, school connection, and perceived general health). The findings indicate that this burnout questionnaire is a valid instrument to use with New Zealand secondary teachers, and also highlight the potential impact of burnout on the health and wellbeing of teachers.” — Milfont, et al.

Burnout is not really an obscure or ignored subject of study. As this research paper points out, “a search of the Social Science Citation Index shows, for example, that burnout has been investigated in more than 4,500 studies.” And teachers are not the only ones who suffer burnout, obviously. I’ve been fortunate to experience three careers gauged as high burnout fields. I’ve worked as an teacher of English as a second language off and on since the mid-nineties while working on other things, so it never really approached the burnout level there. I also worked in newspaper journalism for nearly 10 years, the last four at least running well past the burnout stage. Now, in our 2.0 world I’m a web developer, ranked up there as among the high burnout careers. I’ve not gotten anywhere close to career burnout, but being human, I’ve had my moments of wanting it to end now and again.

A List Apart writer Scott Boms describes web types like me as people “often expected to be “always on”—always working, absorbing information, and honing new skills.” I think it seems to be a common feature among high-burnout professions.

“Burnout is a psychological response to “long-term exhaustion and diminished interest,” and may take months or years to bubble to the surface. First defined by American psychoanalyst Herbert J. Freudenberger in 1972, burnout is “a demon born of the society and times we live in and our ongoing struggle to invest our lives with meaning.” He goes on to say that burnout “is not a condition that gets better by being ignored. Nor is it any kind of disgrace. On the contrary, it’s a problem born of good intentions.” Another description in New York Magazine calls burnout “a problem that’s both physical and existential, an untidy conglomeration of external symptoms and personal frustrations.” — Boms

With a suitable definition now supplied, and backed up by the New Zealand study, back to the difficult task of measuring it amongst a work force. As T. L. Milfont et al. note in the New Zealand study, the Maslach Burnout Inventory⁵ (Maslach and Jackson 1986) is by far the most common tool to measure burnout among staff.

Maslach author Christina Maslach is the Professor of Psychology at the UC Berkeley. “My basic approach to research has always been a more broad-based one that integrates both personality and situational variables,” her university profile reads. “I have also been committed to using several different research paradigms in my work. Finally, I have tried to promote cross-national research on burnout and individuation, either by myself or by others.”

The Maslach approach examins three universally identified traits of burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy, the belief in your own abilities. In their study of the Factorial Validity of Maslach, a group of Norwegian researchers⁶ found that Maslach “provides a suitable measurement to assess burnout across a diversity of professions” after applying it “across eight different occupational groups in Norway: lawyers, physicians, nurses, teachers, church ministers, bus drivers, and people working within advertising and information technology.”

The Norwegians found that Maslach only came up short within the advertising sector. But others have found this popular study to have further shortcomings. In 2004 researchers Peter Winwood and Anthony Winefield tried out both Copenhagen and Maslach methods in measuring burnout among Australian dentists.

“The results suggest that the CBI (Copenhagen) possesses excellent psychometric properties and seems to be an appropriate measure of burnout in populations of health professionals. By comparison, difficulties were encountered in demonstrating the assumed nexus between the 3 (subscale) components of the MBI (Maslach). These results call into question a long-held definition of burnout that appears to have been widely accepted.” — Winwood and Winefield⁷

A 2006 study which Winwood took a hand in editing further explores the problems he and Windefield had with the Maslach methodology. The study Crossover of Burnout and Engagement in Work Teams⁸ look at how  burnout and work engagement are related. Maslach looks at them as opposite ends of a scale, while anothe train of thought looks as them as having some concurrency.

“There are two different schools of thought regarding the relationship between burnout and work engagement. Maslach and Leiter (1997) assume that burnout and engagement are two opposite poles of one continuum. They rephrased burnout as an erosion of engagement with the job, whereby energy turns into exhaustion, involvement turns into cynicism, and efficacy turns into ineffectiveness. In their view, engagement is characterized by energy, involvement, and professional efficacy, which are the direct opposites of the three burnout dimensions. The second school of thought defines and operationalizes work engagement in its own right (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2001, 2004). Instead of being mutually exclusive states, burnout and engagement are considered independent states that are, by their very nature, negatively, but not perfectly related. Recent studies have indeed confirmed this latter view (Schaufeli, Martinez, Marques Pinto, Salanova, & Bakker, 2002a; Schaufeli et al., 2002b). This implies that the evidence for crossover of (low levels of) burnout cannot be taken as evidence for the crossover of work engagement. This validates our choice to examine the crossover of both states and to investigate the extent to which team-level burnout (work engagement) influences individual levels of work engagement (burnout).” — Bakker, et al

The New Zealand research broaches this area as well, but it raises another issue that I found even more profound⁹. The Teacher burnout in New Zealand asserts:

“The Maslach Burnout Inventory (Maslach and Jackson 1986) is the most widely used instrument to measure burnout; however, several methodological and conceptual problems regarding this inventory have been noted. Specifically, its items are limited to people-oriented occupations; there are limitations regarding the definition and measurement of burnout, and understandability of the items across cultural groups; two dimensions measured by this instrument (i.e., depersonalisation and personal accomplishment) do not pertain to the burnout syndrome; and it is owned by a commercial company so that researchers have to pay for its use (Halbesleben and Demerouti 2005; Kristensen et al. 2005). Critics have therefore advocated for the development of alternative burnout measures (see e.g., Cox et al. 2005; Halbesleben and Demerouti 2005).” — T. L. Milfont et al.

Any time access to content is controlled, it’s use becomes limited. Peer review is reduced to economic factors and applicability and extension are controlled by who obtains the rights to build on or adopt the work into other potentially useful purposes. The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory is a newer instrument, released into the public domain, which can be adopted for other purposes. It can be modified for particular needs while still providing a solid basis from which to start. Furhtermore, you can’t beat the cost of the public domain. Milfont et al. found the Copenhagen model to be a “reliable and
valid measure to assess burnout in New Zealand secondary school teachers.”

“The findings need to be considered in light of some limitations. As this is a cross-sectional study, burnout cannot be considered to be causal with respect to the health and wellbeing of teachers. However, the estimated correlations (and their directions) indicate the need to undertake further research to identify the institutional and personal determinants that may underlie the pathways for these adverse associations. Additional research should also investigate the association between the CBI and other more well-established measures of burnout (i.e., Maslach Burnout Inventory) to enhance the validity of the CBI. Notwithstanding these limitations and the relatively small sample size in this study, the findings regarding both the reliability and validity of the instrument and consistency of the results with previous studies support the use of the CBI—a free of charge instrument—to assess burnout among New Zealand secondary school teachers.” — T. L. Milfont et al.

Making research and data “re-useful”

For fixed budget organizations, such as those running public education systems, the barrier for measuring staff wellbeing is cost. Copyright also raises other barriers, such as modiyfying a work for local applicability. While releasing findings and methodologies into the public domain might be the utopian idea, realistically, there can be a middle step that still gives authors and publishers some rights and control, while also allowing their works to get out in the world, be more widely reviewed, adopted, challenged and so fourth. The Science Commons’ Scholars Copyright Project is launching the battle to address this.

“In the Scholar’s Copyright Project, Science Commons develops tools and resources for expanding and enhancing open access (OA) to published research and data. We believe that knowledge-sharing systems and formats based on the paper metaphor block innovation, and that open access is prerequisite for finding new ways to reap the value of the vast amounts of public research now being produced.” — Science Commons

The Science Commons projects seems to be more focused on findings, data, research journals and other publications. But it’s not too big of a stretch to see actual tools such as burnout inventories to come under a similar umbrella. There are now two methods that comply with the Science commons protocol: the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (ODC-PDDL) and the Creative Commons CC0 waiver.

At some point in this blog I’ll want to re-address this issue at greater depth, as the conversation on closed vs. open access seems to be picking up steam.  For now, I’ll summarize my views with this bit of analysis from Copyright and research: an archivangelist’s perspective by A. A. Adams¹⁰

“The cost of continuing with Closed Access is not the loss of a £1 billion industry to the UK (Harnad, 2005), but the loss of countless communications between scholars worldwide that could revolutionize science and scholarship. For the individual author it is the loss of citations and impact, the loss of having one’s work read.” — A. A. Adams

To me, the findings in New Zealand with regards to this study are showing that there’s the beginning of a shift toward this model. The vary technology we use to access and employ tools of research and measuring is shifting toward online systems, and the online realm has been designed form its birth for the sharing and linking of data. As expectations for the lowering of barriers accelerates, the methods and terms under which publishing and use apply must also face transition. The Newspaper industry is finding out at some great cost in its own new media experiments that the “paper metaphor” is nearly obsolete. Those in academic research, and the tools it spawns, should take note as well. Google searches of research should generate more than just abstracts for those who want to remain viable. In terms of burnout studies, in the years to come the Copenhagen model will not only be the standard for burnout, but will also be the one for terms of use as well.

Citations

Milfont, T., Denny, S., Ameratunga, S., Robinson, E., & Merry, S. (2007). Burnout and Wellbeing: Testing the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory in New Zealand Teachers Social Indicators Research, 89 (1), 169-177 DOI: 10.1007/s11205-007-9229-9

Winwood, P., & Winefield, A. (2004). Comparing Two Measures of Burnout Among Dentists in Australia. International Journal of Stress Management, 11 (3), 282-289 DOI: 10.1037/1072-5245.11.3.282

Bakker, A., Emmerik, H., & Euwema, M. (2006). Crossover of Burnout and Engagement in Work Teams Work and Occupations, 33 (4), 464-489 DOI: 10.1177/0730888406291310

Adams, A. (2007). Copyright and research: an archivangelist’s perspective SCRIPT-ed, 4 (3), 285-290 DOI: 10.2966/scrip.040307.285

Footnotes