Invisible Labour and Silent Burnout: Validating the LIS Identity Strain Scale (LISIS) as an Indicator of Occupational Mental Health among Nigerian Academic Librarians

Abstract

Invisible labour and silent burnout remain persistent but poorly measured sources of psychological strain in academic librarianship, particularly in under-resourced institutions. This study develops and validates the Library and Information Science Identity Strain Scale (LISIS), a twelve-item instrument designed to measure identity-based occupational strain among academic librarians. A mixed-methods design was used, with survey data from fifty early-career librarians in three Nigerian universities and semi-structured interviews with ten of them. Occupational mental health is indexed throughout by two established measures, emotional exhaustion on the Maslach Burnout Inventory and satisfaction on the Job Satisfaction Survey. No clinical construct is measured or implied. The LISIS returned an overall internal consistency of .825, with subscale values between .79 and .86, and exploratory factor analysis returned the four dimensions on which it was built, although on a sample of fifty that solution is better read as provisional. Identity strain, and in particular role invisibility and recognition deficit, were strongly associated with emotional exhaustion (r = .62, p < .01) and inversely associated with job satisfaction (r = -.55, p < .01), with the four dimensions together accounting for 51 per cent of the variance in emotional exhaustion. All five null hypotheses were rejected. The evidence reported here is preliminary and awaits confirmatory testing, but it establishes the LISIS as a workable diagnostic instrument for a professional group that has remained largely absent from occupational health scholarship.