Abstract
This study aims to validate the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) adapted to the Italian education sector. Teacher burnout is physical and emotional pain, due to prolonged exposure to school-related stress factors. Previous research has abundantly proven that preventive assessment of teachers’ risk level for burnout may reduce adverse outcomes. In this regard, new assessment tools, able to bring together evidence from fifty years of research on this topic, were mainly used to monitor burnout-risk levels in the school context. For the present work, 846 Italian teachers (Female, 91.1%; M age = 47.52; SD = 9.94) were involved in the study. Confirmatory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure for the core dimensions (BAT-C; exhaustion, mental distance, emotional impairment, cognitive impairment), and a two-factor structure for the secondary dimensions (BAT-S; psychological distress, psychosomatic complaints). The Italian version of the BAT-C and BAT-S has shown good internal consistency (respectively, α = 0.900 and ω = 0.913; α = 0.845 and ω = 0.857) and validity (all correlations between variables showed a p value < 0.01). Our findings support the Italian adaptation of the original version of the BAT as a valid instrument for measuring teachers’ burnout through principal and secondary symptoms.
Highlights
The current study aims to validate the Italian version of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) by assessing its psychometric characteristics
The current study aimed to contribute to the validation of the Italian version of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT; [46]) with data collected from a sample of Italian teachers
Since this study aims to contribute to validate the BAT in the Italian context following as much as possible the original tool presented by Schaufeli and colleagues [46], the authors opted to maintain the original item structure
Summary
Teacher burnout is the experience of physical and emotional pain towards job tasks, characterized by a loss of positive attitude, engagement, and commitment to one’s work [1]. Due to a prolonged exposure to school-related stress factors, teachers feel unable to face job demands [2]. Skaalvik and Skaalvik defined teacher’s stress as follows: “(it) is typically conceptualized as unpleasant emotions resulting from aspects of the work as a teacher” Since the early investigations on teachers’ burnout, this topic has received considerable attention globally, becoming a central element in the latest teacher assessment and learning survey [4]. Teachers’ stress emerged as a pervasive phenomenon among European countries, impacting the working environment in several manners
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