Parental Burnout in Romania: Validity of the Romanian Version of the Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA-RO)

The concept of parental burnout only recently gained the attention of researchers, mainly through the International Investigation of Parental Burnout (IIPB), a 40-country study of the prevalence of PB around the world. Based on the current gold-standard instrument to evaluate parental burnout, that is the Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA), the present research investigates the psychometric properties of the Romanian version of the PBA (PBA-RO) in a sample of 650 Romanian parents (418 mothers), whose age ranged from 18 to 65 (M[subscript age] = 36.60, SD = 5.73). First, we examined internal consistency and construct validity. The results displayed good reliability and the confirmatory factor analyses replicated both expected first- and second-order four-factor models. Second, the positive association between parental burnout and perfectionism, as well as the negative relation between parental burnout and both life satisfaction and resilience, confirmed the PBA-RO's concurrent validity. Third, we replicated the low correlations with sociodemographic characteristics (i.e., age, educational level, family type, number of children, children's age, number of women in the household, number of men in the household, hours spent with children, having a paid professional activity, and neighborhood). The results were discussed according to the Romanian cultural context of parenting. Given the good psychometric properties of the PBA-RO, we concluded that it can successfully assess parental burnout for this population.