Parental Burnout Inventory: Measuring Parental Stress

Parental burnout was assessed for comparative purposes with the Parental Burnout Inventory¹ (PBI, Roskam et al., 2017 (link)), a 22-item self-report questionnaire which has been created based on a deductive approach starting from the tridimensional model of professional burnout (Maslach and Jackson, 1981 (link); Maslach et al., 2001 (link)). The PBI consists of three subscales: Emotional Exhaustion (8 items) (e.g., I feel emotionally drained by my parental role), Emotional Distancing (8 items) (e.g., I sometimes feel as though I am taking care of my children on autopilot), and Loss of Parental Accomplishment (6 items) [e.g., I accomplish many worthwhile things as a parent (reversed)]. Items are rated on 7-point Likert scales: never (0), a few times a year or less (1), once a month or less (2), a few times a month (3), once a week (4), a few times a week (5), every day (6). In the current sample, Cronbach's alphas were 0.92, 0.89, 0.85 for the three subscales and 0.91 for the global score (i.e., the sum score of all PBI items). Alphas were similar in the French and English versions of the questionnaire with respectively 0.94 and 0.92 for Emotional Exhaustion, 0.87 and 0.90 for Emotional Distancing, 0.85 and 0.85 for Loss of Parental Accomplishment, and 0.92 and 0.91 for the global score.