Revisiting the School Burnout Inventory: Further Evidence on Its Factorial Validity, Invariance, and Nomological Network in a Sample of Spanish Adolescents

The School Burnout Inventory (SBI) is a brief scale designed to assess three key dimensions of school burnout: exhaustion, cynicism, and inadequacy. Although numerous validation studies exist, its psychometric properties remain unclear, particularly in the Spanish context, where previous studies have introduced significant modifications to item content and factor structure. This study aims to evaluate the factorial structure, reliability, metric invariance, and nomological validity of the original version of the SBI in a sample of 503 Spanish secondary school students. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) indicated that both the three-factor correlated model and the second-order global school burnout model exhibit satisfactory fit indices. The SBI was found to be invariant across gender and educational levels. The SBI scores showed significant associations with academic achievement, well-being, self-efficacy, and school engagement. These findings provide strong evidence that the SBI is a reliable and valid tool for assessing school burnout in Spanish secondary students.