Measurement invariance of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) across seven cross-national representative samples

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).The aim of this study was to investigate the measurement invariance of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT) across seven cross-national representative samples. In this study, burnout was modeled as a second-order factor in line with the conceptual definition as a syndrome. The combined sample consisted of 10,138 participants from countries in Europe and Japan. The data were treated as ordered categorical in nature and a series of models were tested to find evidence for invariance. Specifically, theta parameterization was used in conjunction with the weighted least squares (mean- and variance adjusted) estimation method. The results showed supportive evidence that BAT-assessed burnout was invariant across the samples, so that cross-country comparison would be justifiable. Comparison of effect sizes of the latent means between countries showed that Japan had a significantly higher score on overall burnout and all the first-order factors compared to the European countries. The European countries all scored similarly on overall burnout with no significant difference but for some minor differences in first-order factors between some of the European countries. All in all, the analyses of the data provided evidence that the BAT is invariant across the countries for meaningful comparisons of burnout scores.W Schaufeli and H De Witte: This project was funded by the KU Leuven (C3-project C32/15/003 – Development and validation of a questionnaire to assess burnout). J Hakanen: This research was funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund, grant number 190126. J. Sinval: This work was produced with the support of INCD funded by FCT and FEDER under the project 22153-01/SAICT/2016. M. Rudnev: The work is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).