Development Of The Job Burnout Scale For Military Personnel

OBJECTIVE: To develop a suitable job burnout scale for Military Personnel, and examined its reliability and validity.METHOD: Based extensive studies on contemporary literaturs about theory model and measure of job burnout, conducting interviews with military personnel, discussing and analyzing it with expert,setting up theory scheme and compiling items, the Job Burnout Scale for Military Personnel was developed.The initial scale has 5 subscales, that were Sense of achievement,Somatization,Self-assessment,Human relation and Demotivation.Then, 1415 military personnel were chosen by random cluster sampling, and tested with this scale, 280 of them were tested by Chinese Maslach Burnout Inventory and Chinese Occupation Stress for Military Personnel at the same time, and 54 of them were retested after two weeks, then 500 health soldiers volunteered to complete the Job Burnout Scale for Military Personnel. The reliability and validity were examined by Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, item analysis, t -test and Correlation Analysis.RESULTS: According to factor analysis, we chose five factors, named Sense of achievement,Somatization,Self-assessment,Human relation , Demotivation and one lie factor. The final scale contained 30 items and 5 lie items. To illustrate the reliability and stability, we had the following results. Firstly, the result of item analysis showed that the correlation coefficients of every items scores and total scores were 0.341～0.704(P<0.01), and subjects with higher scale scores also had significantly higher scores in every factors and total scale than did the soldiers with lower scale scores. The test-retest correlation coefficients of total scale was 0.728, and subscales were 0.598～0.713(P<0.01); the Cronbach'αof total scale was 0.921, and subscales were 0.770～0.826; all split-half reliability was 0.906 of total scale, and 0.733～0.834 of subscales. Secondly, the correlation coefficients among factors were 0.357～0.658 and correlation coefficients of total scale scores and each factor were 0.664～0.836,with P<0.01.Thirdly, according to the results of confirmatory factor analysis, there was a higher degree of accordance between the sample data and the hypothesized structure of five factors, with Chi-Square statistic equal to 771.914, the Degrees of freedom was 395, the Probability level was 0.000, the relative chi-square was 1.954, the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) was 0.044, and the goodness of fit indes(GFI),comparative fit index (CFI),incremental fit index (IFI) equal to 0.904,0.919, 0.920 respectively. The correlation was significant between this scale and Chinese Maslach Burnout Inventory, Chinese Occupation Stress for Military Personnel.CONCLUSION: The study has preliminary completd the development of the Job Burnout Scale for Military Personnel. Through a series of researches on the scale, it has proved that the scale possesses acceptable psychometrics properties on reliability and validity .The scale could be extended in other research interests for military personnel.