Data for "Within- and Between-Person Factor Structure of the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory: Analysis of a Diary Study using Multilevel Confirmatory Factor Analysis"

The study examined the factor structure of burnout, as measured with the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory, taking into account a hierarchical data structure: daily evaluations nested in persons. The participants were 235 employees of a public administration agency who assessed their burnout online immediately after office hours for 10 consecutive working days (from Monday to Friday). Two models were tested with multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, assuming the same one or two-factor structure tested at the within- and between-person levels. The results were ambiguous, as both models showed a reasonable fit to the data. However, since exhaustion and disengagement were strongly correlated at each level and within-person reliability for disengagement was rather low, a unidimensional model seems more valid. Nonetheless, cross-level invariance was not confirmed for either of the structures, showing that factor loadings for the same items differ significantly between the levels. These results suggest that burnout is not the same latent variable at each level; rather, there are factors other than daily burnout experiences that influence person-level scores on the items. Ignoring these across-level discrepancies may lead to biased conclusions, since individuals were found to be an unexpected source of construct variability in our study