Development and longitudinal validation of the Veterinary Stressors Questionnaire.

Veterinarians often experience burnout and show high suicide rates worldwide, yet today, we lack a scale to assess their work stressors. This study presents the development and validation of the Veterinary Stressors Questionnaire (Vet-SQ), which assesses work stressors in veterinary practice. After 40 interviews with French veterinarians, thirty-two items were selected to describe stressful veterinary situations. French veterinarians then completed an online questionnaire. First data collection stage sampled 3,244 respondents, and the second one, 15 months later, sampled 674. Both questionnaires also contained scales assessing burnout, somatic complaints, sleep problems, suicidal ideations. The Vet-SQ was tested for psychometric properties including longitudinal criterion validity. Eight factors were revealed by the exploratory and confirmatory factorial analyses: workload and work-family conflict, negligence and abuse of some clients towards animals, facing pain and distress, financial worries, conflicts between colleagues, fear of making mistakes, fear of danger and fragmented work. Internal consistency of all the factors was satisfactory (0.70 < α < 0.84). Correlation patterns between all stress factors, burnout variables, somatic complaints, sleep problems, and suicidal ideations supported the criterion-related validity of the scale at both measurements : the Vet-SQ showed satisfactory properties, making it a likely effective tool to assess veterinarians' work stressors.