Burnout Syndrome Test (BST)
The Burnout Syndrome Test (Towch & Pontes, 2025) was developed as a brief psychometric assessment for Burnout Syndrome, in line with the World Health Organization’s classification in the ICD-11 (WHO, 2025) which characterised burnout as:
- Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
- Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
- A sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment.
The BST was developed to offer a more current assessment of Burnout Syndrome, as most existing tools were predated this definition and do not align with it.
At the psychometric level, the BST was found to be reliable and to offer a unidimensional factor structure for measuring Burnout through 9 items capturing the key symptoms, as reported in the literature. The scale was originally developed in two samples: a non-representative group of 245 employees and a nationally representative sample of 758 employed individuals.
The BST demonstrated adequate factorial validity in the original study via Confirmatory Factor Analysis (see Towch & Pontes, 2025)
The BST is freely available to anyone interested and is designed to be particularly well-suited to time- and resource-limited research on burnout. Future studies using clinical, longitudinal, and cross-cultural samples are necessary to further consolidate the initial psychometric findings reported in the original study.
Languages in which the test has been developed and/or translated to so far include:
- English 🇬🇧: Download here
