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Original Articlehttp://mjiri.iums.ac.ir Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran (MJIRI)
Iran University of Medical Sciences
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________1. MD, MPH, PhD, Department of Community Medicine, School of Medicine, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, [email protected]. (Corresponding author) MD, PhD, Mental Health Research Center, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran. [email protected]. MD, MPH, PhD candidate, Medical Radiation Department, Faculty of Energy Engineering and Physics, Amirkabir University of Technology,Tehran, Iran. [email protected]. MD, MPH, PhD candidate, Department of Nutrition, School of Public Health, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, [email protected]. MD, MPH, PhD, Department and Occupational Medicine Research Center, School of Medicine, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran,Iran, & Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Department of Medical Sciences, Uppsala University Hospital, S-751 85 Uppsala, [email protected]. MD, PhD, Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Department of Medical Sciences, Uppsala University Hospital, S-751 85 Uppsala-Sweden. [email protected]
Measuring psychosocial exposures: validation of the Persian ofthe copenhagen psychosocial questionnaire (COPSOQ)
Omid Pournik1, Leila Ghalichi*2, Alireza TehraniYazdi3Seyed Mohammad Tabatabaee4, Mostafa Ghaffari5, Eva Vingard6
Received: 20 May 2014 Accepted: 25 March 2015 Published: 13 June 2015
AbstractBackground: The effect of psychosocial work environment on personal and organizational aspects
of employees is well-known; and it is of fundamental importance to have valid tools to evaluatethem. This study aims to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Persian version of CopenhagenPsychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ).
Methods: The questionnaire was translated into Persian and then back translated into English bytwo translators separately. The wording of the final Persian version was established by comparingthe translated versions with the original questionnaire. One hundred three health care workers com-pleted the questionnaire. Chronbach’s alpha was calculated, and factor analysis was performed.
Results: Factor analysis revealed acceptable validity for the five contexts of the questionnaire.Cronbach’s alpha ranged from 0.73 to 0.82 in different contexts.
Conclusion: This study revealed that the Persian version of COPSOQ is a reliable and valid in-strument for measuring psychosocial factors at work.
Keywords: Occupational Health, Validity, Reliability, Iran, Psychosocial Work Environment.
Cite this article as: Pournik O, Ghalichi L, TehraniYazdi A, Tabatabaee SM, Ghaffari M, Vingard E. Measuring psychosocial exposures:validation of the Persian of the copenhagen psychosocial questionnaire (COPSOQ). Med J Islam Repub Iran 2015 (13 June). Vol. 29:221.
IntroductionWorking life and its related conditions are
powerful determinants of health in bothpositive and negative direction. Psychoso-cial working conditions are of growing in-terest for different reasons. Health care re-searchers are becoming more and moreconcerned by the dramatic increase of psy-chological problems and their adverse ef-fects such as bipolar disorders, anxiety dis-orders, depression, burnout, post-traumaticstress, addictive behavior and suicide. In
different surveys and studies from differentpopulations, a large proportion of employ-ees report exposures to negative psychoso-cial factors at work, and the consequencesare believed to be significant for the em-ployees, workplaces and the society (1).
The concept of work and working condi-tions has gone through many changes inmost workplaces in recent years. Compre-hensive changes of production conditionsin industry, administration and service, aswell as demands on the employees are most
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important (2). These changes have some-times resulted in increased psychologicalstress. Furthermore, as a main consequence,sick-leave days and health care costs due topsychosocial factors have increased overthe last years (1,3). Moreover, cardiovascu-lar diseases, musculoskeletal disorders,burnout, reduced quality of life and de-creased motivation and productivity can bethe other outcomes of adverse psychosocialwork factors (1).
To evaluate the psychosocial exposuressituation, it is fundamental to collect validdata of the psychological factors on theworkplace in the first step. According toIranian Occupational Health Legislature,work places are obligated to evaluate po-tential risk factors for different workingplaces and perform appropriate health pro-motion and safety measures when needed.Although psychological health is includedin the definition and requisites, many em-ployers have failed to attend to this matterproperly due to lack of valid measuring in-struments.
Therefore, we aimed to prepare the Per-sian version of the most common and relia-ble measuring instrument in this field. First,we focused on the Job-Content Question-naire (JCQ) and prepared the validated Per-sian version of JCQ, and we then publishedthe results (4). The Copenhagen Psychoso-cial Questionnaire (COPSOQ) has beenregarded a valid and comprehensive newinstrument as it highlights more compo-nents of the complex psychosocial envi-ronment.
The Copenhagen Psychosocial Question-naire has been developed and validated byKristensen and Borg of the Danish NationalInstitute for Occupational Health (5). Thequestionnaire was aimed to be “theory-based without being based on one specifictheory.” Therefore, the COPSOQ is cover-ing a broad range of aspects of leading con-cepts and theories in this field including notonly psychosocial work environment butalso health, well-being and personalitytraits like coping style and sense of coher-ence.
As Nubling (2) has mentioned, the fol-lowing items are addressed for the workenvironment part: the job characteristicsmodel, the Michigan organizational stressmodel, the demand-control-(support) mod-el, the socio-technical approach, the action-theoretical approach, the effort-reward-imbalance model and the vitamin model.
The COPSOQ tries to deal with thebroadness and indefiniteness of the con-struct “psychosocial factors” by applying amultidimensional approach with a verywide spectrum of ascertained aspects (1).
The COPSOQ can be described as a ge-neric tool applicable to all types of workplaces and occupations. Since its validationin Denmark, it has been adapted to differentlanguages such as German, French, Spanishand many others (2,6-8).
A second version of the original ques-tionnaire has been prepared based on thefeedbacks from different studies(COPSOQ2) and has been recently validat-ed. This version of the COPSOQ is morepredictive of the need for recovery as anearly predictor, and it is a sensitive indica-tor of reduced well-being. However, theoriginal questionnaire contains importantvariables which need to be considered inevaluations (9).
The scientific aim of this study was theestablishment of a Persian version of theCOPSOQ1 questionnaire and a detailedexamination and assessment of its measur-ing qualities. All scales from the mediumversion of COPSOQ were included.
MethodsThere are three versions of the COPSOQ1
questionnaire: long (141 questions), medi-um (95 questions) and short (44 questions).Similar to other COPSOQ validation stud-ies in other countries, the medium or some-times long versions of the questionnaire areused for scientific purposes. We decided tostart with the medium version. The Persianquestionnaire was generated by using thestandard translation, back-translation pro-cedure. First, the questionnaire was trans-lated into Persian by two translators sepa-
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rately. Then the two Persian translationswere translated back into the original lan-guage. The various versions were comparedand the wording of the final Persian versionwas established.
The medium version of the COPSOQconsists of 5 contexts: Type of productionand task (17 questions), work organizationand job content (19 questions), interperson-al relations and leadership (24 questions),work-individual interface (8 questions) andhealth and well-being (26 questions). Therespective scales are demonstrated in Table1. Most of the questions have five responseoptions: ''to a great extent, to some extent,somewhat, a little, very little'' or ''always,often, sometimes, rarely, never/almostnever''. The five response options weretransformed on scores ranging from zero to100.
ParticipantsThe employees of a public health service
center (186 individuals) in Tehran-Iranwere sent an e-mail explaining the studyand the confidentiality of the data and in-
vited them to complete the web-basedquestionnaire.
Statistical AnalysisFactor analysis was applied to evaluate
the structural validity of the translated ver-sion. Principal Axis Factoring with Vari-max Rotation was applied. Cronbach’s al-pha coefficient was calculated to assessthe reliability of the scales of the ques-tionnaire. Statistical analysis was per-formed using SPSS 16 and Stata 10 soft-ware.
ResultsThe participants consisted of 103 individ-
uals (66% females). The average age of theparticipants was 39.5 years (SD: 7.2), andthe average education time was 16 years(SD: 1.6).
Kaiser-Meyer- Olkin statistic was 0.783.Bartlett test was significant (p< 0.001), in-dicating the appropriateness of the per-formed factor analysis. Principal Axis Fac-toring with Varimax Rotation was per-formed on 103 cases with no missing field
Table 1. Main Scheme, Scales and Number of the Questions of the Medium Version of the Copenhagen PsychosocialQuestionnaire, (COPSOQ1)
Context and Level Scales Question(N)Work place/Type of production &tasks 1. Quantitative demands 4
2. Cognitive demands 43. Emotional demands 34. Demands for hiding emotions 25. Sensory demands 4
Work organization & job content 6. Influence at work 47. Possibilities for development 48. Degree of freedom at work 49. Meaning of work 310. Commitment to the work place 4
Interpersonal relations &leadership 11. Predictability 212. Role clarity 413. Role conflicts 414. Quality of leadership 415. Social Support 416. Feedback at work 217. Social relations 218. Sense of community 3
Work-individual interface 19. Insecurity at work 420. Job satisfaction 4
Individual/Health and well-being 21. General health 522.Mental health 523.Vitality 424.Behaviourial stress 425. Somatic stress 426. Cognitive stress 4
Validating Persian COPSOQ
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and revealed 20 empirical factors. Threefactors perfectly corresponded to “type ofproduction and task”, “work-individual in-terface” and “health and well-being” scales.Another single factor analysis correspondedto two scales (work organization and jobcontent, interpersonal relations and leader-ship). Only one question (taking holidays)was better placed in the work-individualscale.
Cronbach’s alpha coefficients were calcu-lated and they ranged from 0.734 in thework-individual interface to 0.822 in thetype of production and task (Table 2).
DiscussionThe purpose of this study was to present
the validity results of the COPSOQ1 in thePersian language. Based on the knowledgeof the developers of this questionnaire, itaims at describing a large number of rele-vant factors in the field of psychosocialwork environment, health, well-being andpersonality (1). The original questionnaireshowed good internal reliability and validi-ty 1 and the translated versions of theCOPSOQ in different languages also con-firm that this tool is a reliable and valid in-strument for measuring psychosocial fac-tors at work (2,6). Our results in this studyshowed that the Persian version of theCOPSOQ has good validity for measuringpsychosocial factors at work.
The moderate response rate can be con-sidered a limitation for this study. Howev-er, it is generally believed that representa-tiveness of the sample has a more determin-ing affect than the response rate (10). Thelow response rate may have resulted fromthe web-based nature of our survey, ashighlighted in previous studies (11). Mod-erate response rates had already been re-ported in similar web-based studies inhealth care settings in Tehran (12).
The present questionnaire could be usedat different work environments to help theemployers find opportunities to improvethe psychosocial work conditions (2). Theobserved differences between similar workcategories or within single institutionscould be a good starting point to effectivelyplan for improving the work condition.This questionnaire could also be applied invarious research projects which aim toevaluate the effect of psychosocial expo-sures on different aspects of personal healthand organizational performance. This ques-tionnaire can also be used to monitor thechanges in the work environment throughtime, as already being used in other studies(13).
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Table 2. Chronbach's Alpha for Five Main Context of the Persian Version of COPSOQChronbach's alpha Items
Type of production and task 0.822 17Work organization and job content 0.799 19Interpersonal relations and leadership 0.809 24Work-individual interface 0.734 8Health and well-being 0.757 26
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