Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, Box 210, SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden.
BMC Public Health. 2012 Jan 20;12:62. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-12-62.
Job strain (i.e., high job demands combined with low job control) is a frequently used indicator of harmful work stress, but studies have often used partial versions of the complete multi-item job demands and control scales. Understanding whether the different instruments assess the same underlying concepts has crucial implications for the interpretation of findings across studies, harmonisation of multi-cohort data for pooled analyses, and design of future studies. As part of the 'IPD-Work' (Individual-participant-data meta-analysis in working populations) consortium, we compared different versions of the demands and control scales available in 17 European cohort studies.
Six of the 17 studies had information on the complete scales and 11 on partial scales. Here, we analyse individual level data from 70 751 participants of the studies which had complete scales (5 demand items, 6 job control items).
We found high Pearson correlation coefficients between complete scales of job demands and control relative to scales with at least three items (r > 0.90) and for partial scales with two items only (r = 0.76-0.88). In comparison with scores from the complete scales, the agreement between job strain definitions was very good when only one item was missing in either the demands or the control scale (kappa > 0.80); good for job strain assessed with three demand items and all six control items (kappa > 0.68) and moderate to good when items were missing from both scales (kappa = 0.54-0.76). The sensitivity was > 0.80 when only one item was missing from either scale, decreasing when several items were missing in one or both job strain subscales.
Partial job demand and job control scales with at least half of the items of the complete scales, and job strain indices based on one complete and one partial scale, seemed to assess the same underlying concepts as the complete survey instruments.
工作压力（即高工作要求与低工作控制的结合）是一种常用的有害工作压力指标，但研究往往使用完整多项目工作要求和控制量表的部分版本。了解不同的工具是否评估相同的潜在概念，对于解释跨研究的结果、协调多队列数据进行汇总分析以及设计未来的研究具有至关重要的意义。作为“IPD-Work”（工作人群个体参与者数据荟萃分析）联盟的一部分，我们比较了 17 项欧洲队列研究中可用的不同版本的需求和控制量表。
17 项研究中有 6 项有完整量表的信息，11 项有部分量表的信息。在这里，我们分析了有完整量表（5 项工作要求项目，6 项工作控制项目）的研究中 70751 名参与者的个体水平数据。
我们发现，相对于至少有 3 项项目的量表（r > 0.90）以及仅有 2 项项目的部分量表（r = 0.76-0.88），完整量表的工作要求和控制量表之间的皮尔逊相关系数较高。与完整量表的评分相比，当需求或控制量表中仅缺少一个项目时，工作压力定义之间的一致性非常好（kappa > 0.80）；当使用三个需求项目和所有六个控制项目评估工作压力时，一致性较好（kappa > 0.68），当两个量表都缺少项目时，一致性为中等至较好（kappa = 0.54-0.76）。当仅从一个量表中缺少一个项目时，灵敏度> 0.80，当一个或两个工作压力子量表中缺少多个项目时，灵敏度降低。
至少包含完整量表一半项目的部分工作需求和工作控制量表，以及基于一个完整量表和一个部分量表的工作压力指数，似乎与完整调查工具评估相同的潜在概念。
