External Validation of Psychological Job Demands in a Bus Driver Sample

Abstract

External Validation of Psychological Job Demands in a Bus Driver Sample: David Gimeno, et al. Occupational Health Research Unit. Department of Health and Experimental Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain—Psychosocial risk factors have been considered as characteristics of the work environment rather than an individual issue, but their presence in the workplace is usually measured by self‐reported questionnaires, based on worker attitudes. The objective of the study was to compare a self‐reported measure of psychological job demands in a bus driver sample with selected indicators of bus company activity, as external ‘objective’ indicators, in order to assess its external validity. The final sample included 713 drivers in 41 routes. Self‐reported measures of psychosocial work risk factors were obtained by the Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ). Four external indicators were available for each route: passengers, break times, bus incidents, and regulating actions. Spearman's correlation coefficient was estimated to assess the validity. Correlation coefficients showed that self‐reported psychological demands were statistically significant correlated (p<0.05) with two external indicators: bus incidents (rho=0.397), and regulating actions (rho=0.475). Self‐reported psychosocial risk factors have been compared with independent external indicators of the psychosocial work environment, trying to avoid any subject's perception. According to our results, psychological demands measured by the JCQ seem to reflect the actual psychosocial work environment. Other studies are necessary to confirm these results and to assess job control and job social support. This would be another step in improving our knowledge of the quality of measurement of psychosocial risk factors.

An Integrated Model for the Assessment of Stress-related Risk Factors in Health Care Professionals

“…Several studies on occupational stress adopted both subjective and objective methods to evaluate job stressors and strain 19,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27] . All the studies found some correlation between subjective and objective measures.…”

“…Therefore, the evaluation of job stress should result from an integration of subjective and objective measures of stressors, strain and health outcomes. An integrated assessment of job-stress was applied in this study to a group of hospital workers, and compared to similar experiences on health care workers [21][22][23] and workers from other sectors 19,[24][25][26][27] .…”

Inter‐method agreement between O*NET and survey measures of psychosocial exposure among healthcare industry employees

“…The Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ), a valid and reliable instrument [Karasek et al, 1998;Ostry et al, 2001;Landsbergis et al, 2002;Gimeno et al, 2004], was utilized in the questionnaire to assess demand, control, and support dimensions. One question (conflicting demands) was reworded and reversed.…”

Estructura factorial, fiabilidad y validez de la escala de adicción al trabajo (WorkBAT): Versión española.

“…Por otro lado, también se utilizaron algunos correlatos (Del-Líbano et al, 2010) o también denominados indicadores externos (Gimeno, Benavides, Mira, Martínez y Benach, 2004) en forma de preguntas que los informantes debían de contestar. Algunas de ellas hacían referencia a "En términos generales, ¿te sientes saludable?…”