Adaptation and psychometric properties of the SBI-U scale for Academic Burnout in university students

The objective of the present study was to draw up a Spanish adaptation for university students of the School Burnout Inventory (SBI) 9-item scale. This entailed a double adaptation, on the one hand from English into Spanish and then from secondary school students to university students. The scale was applied to 578 university students (25.7% men; 74.3% women) from different regions in Spain. The findings indicate that the University students-SBI has the same structure as the original version in English for secondary school students. This was confirmed by factor analysis that pointed to the existence of three factors: Exhaustion, Cynicism and Inadequacy. Furthermore, the three subscales showed acceptable reliability (between .77 and .70) In addition to this, indications of validity were found using eighteen external correlates and seven contrast scales. Finally the SBI-U constitutes a potentially useful instrument for evaluating academic burnout in university students.