Copenhagen Burnout Inventory

The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (CBI) measures burnout as prolonged physical and psychological exhaustion. It has three separate parts: personal burnout, work-related burnout and client-related burnout. The patient answers only the parts that fit their situation, so the personal part works for everyone, including people without a job. Before the questions, the clinician indicates whether the patient is in work and whether that work involves clients.

Personal burnout (6 items) covers general physical and psychological exhaustion. Work-related burnout (7 items) covers exhaustion the patient attributes to their work. Client-related burnout (6 items) covers exhaustion from working with clients, patients, social service recipients, elderly citizens or inmates. Each answer is scored 0, 25, 50, 75 or 100; the last work-related item is reverse-scored. Each part's score is the average of its items, from 0 to 100, with higher scores meaning more exhaustion.

Clinicians use the CBI when exhaustion or work stress plays a role for the patient, for example when stress at work is a trigger for drinking or drug use. The work-related part only applies to patients in work, and the client-related part only if their work involves clients, patients or similar groups.

The CBI was developed by Tage S. Kristensen, Marianne Borritz, Ebbe Villadsen and Karl B. Christensen at the National Research Centre for the Working Environment in Copenhagen for the PUMA study (Project on Burnout, Motivation and Job Satisfaction), and published in 2005.

In a representative sample of Danish adults aged 20–59, the mean personal burnout score was 31.7 among employed people and 36.6 among people without current employment. Validation studies in other languages, for example Spanish, Slovak and Greek, have reported acceptable to good reliability. A Serbian study found that the full 19-item version lacked structural validity, while a shorter 13-item form performed better.

The CBI is not a diagnostic instrument, and its developers do not define official cutoffs for individual scores. It measures exhaustion only, not other aspects of burnout. Burnout and depression overlap, so a high score alone does not distinguish between them. According to the developers, mixing the CBI questions with other questions helps to avoid stereotyped response patterns. There is no validated German version, which is why the form is only available in English here.