Abstract: Job burnout is defined as “a psychological syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who work with other people in some capacity”. Since the competition sport coaches work in a very unique environment, their health and burnout are different from ordinary person, a different scale to measure their job burnout is needed. The present study reports the development of a job burnout scale for competition sport coaches in China.
In developing the job burnout scale for completion sports coaches, several previous burnout scales for other professions have been collected and carefully reviewed. In addition, 28 sports coaches were interviewed for obtaining their feelings and details of their working environments. Based on the above information and serious consideration of characteristics of the sports profession, the first edition of Job Burnout Scale for Competition Sports Coaches, which includes 50 items, was compiled.
The first edition of the scale was tested on 274 competition sports coaches and an exploratory factor analysis was performed. According to the item loadings on different factors, finally 31 items were selected and four factors were identified. These factors can be named as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced personal accomplishment, and knowledge exhaustion. The follow up test shows these factors have acceptable reliability, their corresponding Cronbach’s α coefficients are 0.81, 0.67, 0.59, and 0.67. The total reliability of the scale is 0.79.
For validating the new edition of the scale, another 240 competition sports coaches were tested. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed to test the postulated four factors model. By using covariance structure model with maximum likelihood method, the results show a rather good fit between the data and the theoretical model: χ2/df equals 1.91, the goodness-of-fit (GFI) is 0.82, the absolute anastomosis index (AGFI) is 0.80, the value fitting index (NNFI) is 0.88, and the CFI fitting index is 0.88. All these results confirmed the present scale reaches the standard requirements of psychological measurement.

Key words: job burnout, sport coaches, job burnout scale, validation of scale