The two studies reported here are part of the BParent research program conducted at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium which received the approval of the Ethics Committee of the Psychological Sciences Research Institute. BParent is a recent research program focusing on the nature, causes and consequences of parental burnout. Participants in the two studies were informed about this research program through social networks, websites, schools, pediatricians or by word of mouth. Inclusion criteria was to be parent and to have at least one child still leaving at home. In order to avoid (self-)selection bias, participants were not informed that the study was about parental burnout. Study 1 was presented as a study about work-family balance (this ensured that all participants were working parents, which was important as we aimed to examine the specificity of parental burnout vis-à-vis professional burnout). Study 2 was presented as a study about “being a parent in the twenty-first century” (we aimed to recruit a wider sample, including unemployed parents). Parents could participate in the studies only if they had (at least) one child still living at home. Participants were invited to complete an online questionnaire after giving informed consent. The informed consent signed by the participants allowed them to withdraw at any stage without having to give any justification. They were also assured that data would remain anonymous. Participants who completed the questionnaire had the opportunity to enter a lottery with a 1/1000 chance of winning €200. Participants who wished to participate in the lottery had to provide their email address, but the latter was disconnected from their questionnaire.
A potential measure of parental burnout was assessed in both studies. A preliminary version of the Parental Burnout Inventory (PBI) was created and used in Study 1. This version was an adaptation of the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI; Maslach and Jackson, 1981 ), in which each of the 22 items of the MBI was adapted to fit the parenting context. For example, “I feel emotionally drained from my work” was changed into “I feel emotionally drained from my parental role.” In Study 2, refinement of the PBI led us to reconsider items from the depersonalization factor. Eleven new items presented in the Table S2 were proposed relating to the concept of emotional distancing, which appeared to be more suited to parental context than depersonalization. The idea of replacing depersonalization with emotional distancing emerged from the discussions of two 1-h focus groups (n1 = 12, n2 = 8) that we set up with colleagues to discuss the results of Study 1 (and in particular the poor validity of the depersonalization component in the parental context). Four questions had been prepared by the facilitators: (1) Do you think that depersonalization exists in parental burnout? (2) If yes, what are the core characteristics of depersonalization in parental burnout? (3) If not, is there another specific mechanism in parental burnout (try to name it)? (4) What are its characteristics? Exactly the same idea (i.e., that depersonalization takes the form of emotional distancing in the parental context) emerged from the two focus groups. The 11 “emotional distancing” items were then created and refined together with 8 colleague-parents who participated in these groups. Parental burnout was therefore reassessed in Study 2 using a set of 28 items, leading to a final 22-item version assessing emotional exhaustion (8 items), emotional distancing (8 items) and personal accomplishment (6 items). In both studies, PBI items were rated on the same 7-point Likert scale as in the original MBI: 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). Factor and global scores were obtained by summing the appropriate item scores, with higher scores indicating greater burnout; the items of the personal accomplishment factor were therefore reverse-scored.
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