Maslach burnout inventory-general survey (MBI-GS)

Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS) is the gold standard for measurement and identification of job burnout^1,20, which is validated in a variety of occupations. The Chinese version of MBI-GS consists of 15 items with three dimensions describing different symptoms of burnout: exhaustion (EX, 5 items), which is the central reflection and the most prominent manifestation of burnout; cynicism(CY, 4 items), which reflects indifference, detached attitude towards work and active disengagement from work; and professional efficacy (PE, 6 items), which expresses the sense of competence and accomplishment during one’s work²⁰. A standard 7-point Likert scale is used to measure the experience of job burnout with a score of each item ranging from 0(never) to 6(always), representing the frequency of the corresponding statement.

According to previous studies, the feeling of efficacy always appears simultaneously with overwhelming exhaustion and cynicism, thus to some extent, it can be substituted by the other two core dimensions^1,17,21. For this reason, exhaustion and cynicism were selected in our research for the assessment of job burnout. Cronbach’s alpha was used for examining the reliability of the subscales, and the coefficients for EX and CY in our study were 0.910 and 0.880 respectively, indicating good internal consistency of the items in each subscale²². Additionally, we executed the confirmatory factor analysis using AMOS version 22.0 (IBM Corporation, Meadville, PA, USA) and calculated the validity of the subscales. The convergent validity for EX and CY were 0.664 and 0.646, respectively, indicating the appropriateness of the theoretical construct²³.