UC Santa Cruz

The measurement of burnout is an important phenomenon in today’s world. A well-designed, statistically proven burnout scale is expected to have a significant positive impact on teachers’ turnover, early retirement, and the propensity to leave the profession early. When analyzing burnout literature, I identified two important issues in the literature.First, the literature on burnout is characterized by an intensely individualistic way of interpreting the issue. Furthermore, organizational and structural factors are mostly discussed in the literature as either-or terms instead of considering these two concepts as dialectically intertwined. To counteract this narrow approach, while developing this scale, I positioned teacher agency, in the face of structural constraints, as one of the main concerns. Second, the deeply negative nature of burnout discussed in the literature is problematic. The concept of engagement was also used in the discussion of burnout in the literature. However, an examination of the literature reveals an inconclusive discussion between the interrelated nature between burnout and engagement. Thus, this study aims to review the interactional relationship between burnout and engagement. I examine this from conceptual, psychometric, and theoretical perspectives to understand the interactional relationship between them. A comprehensive understanding these two major concepts was motivated by my main goal of developing a burnout scale. The objective of this study is the development and initial validation of a teacher burnout and engagement scale (TBES). The final version of the scale is composed of emotional exhaustion, structural constraints, and engagement factors. The main finding of my research is a 17-item TBES. I used the final 17 items as observable variables to measure two unobservable latent variables, namely burnout and engagement. After conducting a set of psychometric analyses in three separate data collection processes for two years, I started with 65 items and finally concluded with 17 items that work best to identify burnout and engagement. Burnout also comprises two separate factors—emotional exhaustion and structural constraints. I observed the multi-dimensionality of the scale with exploratory factor analysis, internal consistency reliability with Cronbach’s alpha, and convergent validity with some other scales, such as MBI and UWES. The validity was also tested in the nomological network of burnout and engagement (JD-R Model). I hope that such a scale will make a significant contribution to the field by offering a unique way of viewing ‘burnout and engagement’ from the context of a single multidimensional tool. I believe this study will help researchers better understand burnout and engagement and their natures from a different perspective. It is expected that the scale will be accessible and widely used by education researchers and practitioners and administrators in their educational settings.