PLS-SEM Validation for Burnout Measures in Latino College Students: A Socially Sustainable Educational Return

Abstract

Health care is an essential factor in the social sustainability of the university; therefore, it is a challenge and a responsibility to monitor a safe return to school that ensures the support of the physical and emotional well-being of students. In this sense, the Maslach Burnout Inventory-Student Survey (MBI-SS) is a validated resource with robust techniques in several regions of the world to diagnose school burnout. However, few efforts appear in the literature to validate it from a predictive approach in the Latin region. This study aims to validate, from a predictive approach, measures of school burnout in Latino university students from Mexico and Colombia. A total of 235 surveys were administered (Mx. n = 127, Co. n = 108), and a Partial Least Squares (PLS) measurement model was validated using the statistical program SmartPLS 3.3.7. As a result, 22 valid items were obtained in four reliable subconstructs: burnout, family cynicism, inefficacy, and somatization. The value of this research is its contribution to filling two gaps related to the MBI-SS scale (1) to contribute to the validation of the MBI-SS in a Latin context and (2) the use of the nonparametric statistical technique PLS focused on prediction.