Globally, up to a third of all traffic accidents, which cause 1.3 million deaths a year, involve professional drivers. This is due to the fact that, beyond the individual effect of adverse working conditions, work-related health and behavioral outcomes (e.g., psychological strain, sleep disorders and risky behaviors) may compromise safe driving outcomes.
#Measuring validity and reliability drivers
Īccordingly, different authors consider occupational risks of professional drivers a public health problem. In the particular case of transportation workers, the interest in studying job stress-related dynamics has been gaining ground during the last decade, due to the fact that this type of stress affects not only the workers’ domain but, given its predictive role of traffic crashes, threatens the health and welfare of all potential users of the roads. Job stress constitutes an issue whose implications involve not only the workers’ performance, but their health, safety, and well-being. Overall, worldwide evidence supports the fact that job stress represents a key psychosocial risk factor in most occupations. In practical settings, these instruments can be useful for occupational researchers and practitioners studying stress-related issues from the perspective of human factors. Also, there is a high consistency between both measures of stress, even though they belong to different theoretical conceptions of the phenomenon. This study supports the value and reliability of ERI-10 and JCQ-20 for measuring job stress among professional drivers. The results suggest that the abbreviated versions of ERI (10 items) and JCQ (20 items) have clear dimensional structures, high factorial weights, internal consistency and an improved fit to the task’s dynamics and hazards, commonly faced by of professional drivers a short set of items with low psychometrical adjustment was excluded, and the root structure of the questionnaires was kept. Analyses were performed using Structural Equation Models, thus obtaining basic psychometric properties of both measures and an optimized structure for the instruments, in addition to testing their convergent validity.
We examined the data collected from 726 Spanish professional drivers.
This study assessed the psychometric properties, convergent validity and consistency of two measures used for researching occupational stress among professional drivers: the Siegrist’s ERI (Effort-Reward Imbalance Inventory) and Karasek’s JCQ (Job Content Questionnaire). However, there is a clear lack of validated tools for measuring stress and other key hazardous issues affecting transport workers, and most of the existing ones, frequently generic, do not fully consider the specific features that properly describe the work environment of professional driving. The accumulated evidence has shown how professional drivers are, in psychosocial terms, among the most vulnerable workforces, and how their crashes (some of them preceded by stressful working conditions) constitute both an occupational and public health concern.