The Greek Burnout Assessment Tool: Examining Its Adaptation and Validity.

Burnout is a significant challenge in the workplace. Its extent is global and its unfavourable consequences are diverse, affecting the individual, the organization, and society. The aim of the present study was to examine the adaptation and assess the validity of the Greek version of the Burnout Assessment Tool (BAT). The adaptation process included the translation and back-translation of the BAT. Data were collected from 356 Greek employees from diverse sectors. Confirmatory factor analysis and item response theory were utilized to assess the validity of the Greek version of the BAT. According to the findings of the present research, the core symptoms scale and the secondary symptoms scale of BAT-23 and BAT-12 models demonstrated adequate structures for the analysis and measurement of burnout in the Greek context. Finally, the psychometric performance of the BAT-GR-12 compared to the BAT-GR-23 establishes it as a more optimum instrument for the assessment of burnout across Greek working adults.

Effective Backpropagation Training with Variable Stepsize.

The issue of variable stepsize in the backpropagation training algorithm has been widely investigated and several techniques employing heuristic factors have been suggested to improve training time and reduce convergence to local minima. In this contribution, backpropagation training is based on a modified steepest descent method which allows variable stepsize. It is computationally efficient and posseses interesting convergence properties utilizing estimates of the Lipschitz constant without any additional computational cost. The algorithm has been implemented and tested on several problems and the results have been very satisfactory. Numerical evidence shows that the method is robust with good average performance on many classes of problems. Copyright 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.