What is in the name? Content analysis of questionnaires on perceived quality of one’s work life

Quality & Quantity https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01165-z What is in the name? Content analysis of questionnaires on perceived quality of one’s work life Renaud Gaucher1 · Ruut Veenhoven1,2 Accepted: 11 May 2021 © The Author(s) 2021 Abstract There is a great demand for information on how workers evaluate the quality of their jobs. In response to this demand, a multitude of questionnaires has been developed, which are presented under different names and stress different aspects of work life. It is therefore difficult to see what questionnaire is best suited to one’s information demand. This problem can be solved by considering the content of the different questionnaires through the same conceptual lens, focussing on the meaning of each of the constituting questions separately. In this paper, we adapted Veenhoven’s conceptualization of qualities of life in general to the work setting, which gave us a matrix of 9 nested notions of perceived quality of a worker’s work life, and then used this matrix to classify the meaning addressed in 12 questionnaires. Some of these questionnaires appear to address a clear meaning, while others cover a mix of meanings. These contents are presented in a tabular overview here to allow users to select the questionnaire the most adapted to their needs. This approach can also be used to develop new questionnaires on perceived quality of work life. Keywords Content analysis · Self-report · Wellbeing at work · Quality of work life · Job satisfaction · Happiness at work 1 Introduction 1.1 Practice of measurement of perceived quality of work life A lot of work has been done on how workers evaluate the quality of their job. An advanced search in Google Scholar on October 20, 2020, yielded the following hits on related terms: ‘satisfaction with work’: 26,000 hits ‘job satisfaction’ 1,710,000, ‘quality of work’ * Renaud Gaucher Ruut Veenhoven 1 Erasmus Happiness Research Organization, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burg. Oudlaan 50, Van der Goot Building, M5‑43, 3062 PA Rotterdam, The Netherlands 2 Optentia Research Program, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa 13 Vol.:(0123456789) R. Gaucher, R. Veenhoven 300,000, ‘happiness at work’ 6210, ‘work happiness’ 3540, ‘employee happiness’ 3130, ‘employee wellbeing 10,900 and ‘well-being at work’ 6240. In addition to this academic research, there is commercial trade in the measurement of perceived quality of work designed to serve the information demands of organizations. One of the reasons for this demand is that an understanding of workers’ subjective perceptions of the quality of their work provide management with indications of the objective quality of the workers’ work conditions and the need to invest in improving these conditions. Another reason for this demand is that managers expect that satisfied workers will be more productive and less inclined to report sick or quit. Therefore, managers want to know whether investments in worker satisfaction are required and which aspects of the work situation they should focus on. A related reason is that dissatisfied workers tend to demand compensatory pay rises, both by individual workers and in collective bargaining situations with trade unions. In addition to these material concerns, there is also the moral requirement for managers to have an interest in the worker’s wellbeing. Such information is increasingly quantified in the reports of ‘social accountability’ of organizations. There is also a more general interest in how workers typically see the quality of their work and in particular how satisfied they are with their job. The average annual hours worked in 2017 was 1759 in OECD countries. This means that the satisfaction experienced in these hours will affect the general satisfaction climate in a country, and this is likely to affect acceptance of the prevailing socio-economic order. Consequently, satisfaction with work is also a standard topic in national social reports, such as the Quality of American Life (Campbell et al. 1976) and the Enquête sur la qualité de vie (INSEE 2011). The practice of measuring quality of one’s work has resulted in a plethora of questionnaires, such as the Quality of Working Life Systemic Inventory (Martel and Dupuis 2006), the Quality of Work Life Measure (Sirgy et al. 2001) the Work-Related Quality of Life scale (Van Laar et al. 2007), the Generic Job Satisfaction Scale (Macdonald and MacIntyre 1997) and the Job Satisfaction Survey (Spector 1985). In addition to these ‘general’ measures of quality of work life, there are questionnaires tailored to specific occupations, such as for teachers the Questionnaire of Teachers’ Work Life Quality (Javadi et al. 2019) and the Teacher Job Satisfaction Questionnaire (Lester 1987), and for nurses the Brooks and Anderson’s (2005) quality of nursing work life questionnaire and the Nursing Home Nurse Aide Job Satisfaction Questionnaire (Castle 2007). This variety in the types of questionnaires available for the measurement of self-perceived quality of one’s work life also exists for other domains of life, such as one’s health, which is often measured using multi-item questionaires on ‘Health-Related-Quality Of Life’ abbreviated HRQOL and also referred to as Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO). A ‘general’ measure of this kind is the 100-item Rand Health Insurance Study Questionnaire (Brook et al.1979), best known in its shortened 36 item version SF36 (Ware and Sherbourne 1992), a disease-specific questionnaire on one health condition for cancer patients is the EORTC Quality of Life Questionnaire (EORTC 2020). 1.2 Uncertainty about meanings measured It is not always clear what questionnaires actually measure. Common names of questionnaires such as the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ; Weiss et al. 1967) and the Job Descriptive Index (JDI; Smith, Kendall & Hulin, 1969) are not very informative. There is typically more information contained in the names given to subscales in a questionnaire, such as the sub-scale ‘flow and intrinsic motivation’ in Singh and Aggarwal’s (2018) 13 What is in the name? Content analysis of questionnaires on… Happiness at Work Scale, however, the notions referred to in such names are often not well defined. In theory, scale development starts from a clear concept and researchers select items that validly tap into this concept. In this vein MacKenzie et al. (2011) divide the development of a questionnaire into 10 steps: (1) development of a conceptual definition of the construct, (2) generation of items to represent the construct, (3) assessment of the content validity of the items, (4) formal specification of the measurement model, (5) data collection to conduct pretest, (6) scale purification and refinement, (7) data gathering from new samples and re-examination of scale properties, (8) assessment of the scale validity, (9) cross-validation of the scale, and (10) development of norms for the scale. In practice, h (...truncated)