Evaluating the Parental Burnout Assessment in parents of children with and without complex care needs: Measurement invariance, group differences, and the correlates of socio-demographic characteristics

The study aim was to evaluate the measurement invariance of the Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA), across parents of children with complex care needs (CCN) and parents of children without CCN, compare burnout scores between these groups, and explore how socio-demographic characteristics relate to parental burnout within each parenting context. The PBA was completed by 337 parents of children with CCN and 329 parents who did not have a child with CCN. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported the theoretically proposed four-factor structure of the PBA, encompassing exhaustion in the parental role, feelings of being fed up, contrast with pervious parental self, and emotional distancing. A subsequent second-order CFA indicated that these four dimensions could be explained by a single overarching factor, parental burnout. Multigroup CFA supported scalar invariance across groups for both the four-factor model and the second-order model, indicating that the observed group differences in PBA scores reflect true differences rather than measurement bias. Parents of children with CCN reported significantly higher PBA scores than parents of children without CCN (d = 1.33, p < .001). Among the socio-demographic characteristics examined, we found that being a mother of a child with CCN was associated with substantially higher PBA scores compared to being a father of a child with CCN. This gender difference was smaller among parents of children without CCN. Parental age, ethnicity, educational attainment, being single parent, the number of children, and minimum and maximum age of the child were not associated with higher parental burnout scores. Findings underscore the heightened vulnerability for parental burnout among parents of children with CCN compared to parents of children without CCN while also providing further evidence for the suitability of the PBA as a research instrument for assessing parental burnout across the caregiving context of being a parent of a child with CCN or not.