Scientific background: Burnout (CBI)
About this test
The CBI was developed in 2005 by Kristensen, Borritz, Villadsen, and Christensen as a freely available alternative to the commercial Maslach Burnout Inventory. It shows good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha between .85 and .91) and correlates strongly with established burnout and exhaustion measures. The authors emphasize that burnout is not a stable personality trait but can change meaningfully over time -- retaking the test periodically can help make those changes visible. The Personal Burnout subscale (items 1-6) is also discussed in the research literature as a possible screening signal for autistic burnout. The authors themselves published normative data in 2004 (Borritz & Kristensen, nfa.dk): the only clinical cutoff they publish is a score of 50 or more as "a high degree of burnout" (in the PUMA project's comparison sample of roughly 1,900 employees in social/care professions, 16-22% reached this level depending on the subscale). The lower bound of the "average" range was additionally derived from the means/standard deviations reported there: Personal Burnout from a representative Danish population sample (N=1,498, M=32.7, SD=15.7), Work- and Client-related Burnout from the PUMA sample (Work: M=33.0, SD=17.7, N=1,910; Client: M=30.9, SD=17.6, N=1,752), since no general-population data exists for those two work-specific subscales.
Dimensions
Personal Burnout
General physical and emotional exhaustion, independent of your working life.
Work-Related Burnout
Exhaustion specifically tied to your job.
Client-Related Burnout
Exhaustion from working with clients, patients, students, or others you support -- relevant if you work in a role like that.
Sources & license
Kristensen, T. S., Borritz, M., Villadsen, E., & Christensen, K. B. (2005). The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory: A new tool for the assessment of burnout. Work & Stress, 19(3), 192–207.
The Copenhagen Burnout Inventory was explicitly developed as a freely available alternative to licensed burnout instruments and is widely treated as public-domain by its own distribution practice; no first-party document we could locate states this in so many words, so this is a well-established inference from how the authors distribute it rather than a verbatim license grant.
Borritz, M., & Kristensen, T. S. (2004). Copenhagen Burnout Inventory: Normative data from a representative Danish population and results from the PUMA study. National Institute of Occupational Health, Copenhagen.
Freely accessible normative document published by the original authors (nfa.dk). Contains the only officially published cutoff (>=50 points = high burnout) and the means/standard deviations used to derive the lower bound of the "average" range. Item wording, response-scale anchors, and scoring verified verbatim against this document.
https://nfa.dk/media/hl5nbers/cbi-first-edition.pdf