Constructing the Academic Burnout Scale: A Psychometric Approach to Contemporary Stressors in Higher Education

Academic burnout is a psychological syndrome marked by emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and diminished academic efficacy. While widely used instruments such as the Maslach Burnout Inventory–Student Survey (MBI-SS) have provided foundational insight into burnout, they fail to account for contemporary academic stressors introduced by digital learning environments, economic precarity, and post-pandemic educational shifts. The present research addressed this limitation by developing and validating the Academic Burnout Scale (ABS), a multidimensional instrument designed to capture burnout phenomena relevant to modern university contexts. Five hundred undergraduate students completed the ABS along with established measures of stress, burnout, anxiety, and depression. Factor analyses supported an eight-factor structure encompassing emotional exhaustion, cynicism, reduced academic efficacy, digital fatigue, financial strain, hybrid learning difficulties, impostor phenomenon, and psychological resilience. The ABS exhibited high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.80–0.87), strong convergent validity with the MBI-SS (r = .75), and significant predictive validity with GPA (r = –.63), anxiety (r = .68), and depression (r = .72). These findings suggest that academic burnout in the 21st-century university student population is best conceptualized as a multidimensional construct shaped by both classical and novel stressors