How to Use Questionnaire Results in Psychosocial Risk Assessment: Calculating Risks for Health Impairment in Psychosocial Work Risk Assessment.

Jan Dettmers,Christiane R Stempel

doi:10.3390/ijerph18137107

Abstract

Psychosocial risk questionnaires are common instruments in occupational safety and health promotion. Organizations use psychosocial risk questionnaires to obtain an economic overview of psychological job stressors and job resources. However, the procedures to assess if a result for a given workplace group is critical and calls for further action differ significantly and are often based on an arbitrary rule of thumb instead of empirically based evaluations. This article presents a method to translate questionnaire results into risk values for the occurrence of health impairment. We test this method on a dataset including the job stressors, job resources, and emotional exhaustion of 4210 employees from different industries. We applied logistic regression analysis to calculate the risks for impaired psychological health, indicated by high values of the burnout indicator emotional exhaustion. The results indicate significantly different health impairment risks (probabilities) for different scores on the job stressors and job resources scales as well as for scale score combinations. The risk values can be used to define cutoff values between high- and low-risk workplaces that are empirically based on stressor–strain relationships and are easily understandable by all stakeholders in the psychosocial risk assessment process, including laypersons.

Highlights

Psychosocial work risk questionnaires are standard tools in occupational health and safety promotion, in general, and work risk assessment, in particular
The explained variance estimated by Nagelkerkes R2 [38] was 0.387 (Cox and Snell R2 = 0.222; [39]), indicating that a substantial part of the variance of psychological health impairment can be explained by all assessed job stressors and job resources together
This paper aimed to propose a method to translate questionnaire scores into risk values for psychological health impairment

Summary

Introduction

Psychosocial work risk questionnaires are standard tools in occupational health and safety promotion, in general, and work risk assessment, in particular. Unlike risk assessment results regarding physical or chemical hazards, the results of psychosocial risk questionnaires often lack meaningful cutoff values or empirically based indications on how to interpret specific scores. II [2]) provide statistical reference values based on extensive and industry-specific samples These references do not indicate if a specific value is good, acceptable, or bad regarding the specific health impairment risk. At most, they provide a comparison with an industry-specific status quo that still might represent unacceptable working conditions for psychological health and well-being. Practitioners need clear indications of how to interpret the results of questionnaire surveys in terms of actual health risks to make conclusions about the urgency of taking measures within a concerned workplace group

Objectives

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Conclusion