Measuring job and academic burnout with the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI): Factorial invariance across samples and countries

• The Oldenburg Burnout Inventory was adapted to measure academic burnout (OLBI-S).
• Job and academic burnout showed partial scalar invariance across German nurses and German students.
• We confirmed the equivalence of academic burnout across Greek and German students as assessed with the adapted OLBI-S.
• The investigation of latent means revealed that Greek students report significantly higher levels of exhaustion than German students.

This study examined the factor structure and measurement invariance of the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI) across different groups (German employees vs. German students) and tested academic burnout across samples from different countries (Greek vs. German students). Our results supported the proposed two-factor structure for each sample separately. In addition, multigroup analyses partially supported the equivalence of job and academic burnout within the German samples and the equivalence of academic burnout across Greek and German students. In sum, we suggest that the OLBI is a robust instrument for the measurement of burnout in both contexts: work and academic.