Confirmatory factor analysis of the MBI in Colombian parents of children with trisomy 21

The identification of parental burnout syndrome in families with chronically ill children has become a problem of interest given that the burnout syndrome can lead to loss of interest for the wellbeing of the child. There is no recommended tool to determine parental burnout. The aim of this study is to validate the Maslach Burnout Inventory Health Services Survey (MBI-HSS; Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1996) in a population of parents of children with Down syndrome. We performed a confirmatory factor analysis and validation of the MBI-HSS in 103 Colombian parental couples of children with trisomy 21. In the confirmatory factor analysis, we found a coefficient of .82 in the intercorrelation of all the items, indicating that the three factors did not explain the construct. We found differences between the expected and observed covariance matrices with goodness-of-fit test LR¹ = 423.758 (p < .001). The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) index was .80. In the subsequent exploratory factor analysis (EFA), we found that two factors explained 83% of the variance. Our findings suggest that the items of the original construct are not able to diagnose the tridimensional burnout syndrome in parents and that a construct of two dimensions could be enough to diagnose parental burnout.