ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comprehensive and critical overview of the way burnout. It addresses the issue of the prevalence of burnout. Observation is the most obvious way to gather information about an individual's psychological characteristics. Interviewing clients or patients in order to assess their mental state is most popular, particularly among physicians, counsellors, and social workers. The interviewer is flexible and may ask the interviewee, for instance, to clarify statements, elaborate particular issues, or explain contradictions. Paper-and-pencil self-report questionnaires have a number of practical benefits, which makes their use very popular. They are quick to administer to large groups and are therefore very efficient and cheap. A number of burnout inventories have been exclusively employed in one or two studies. Three illustrations are presented of an inductively constructed and a deductively constructed multidimensional questionnaire, and of a one-dimensional instrument.
