The Development and Application of the Chinese Version of the Work Environment Impact Scale
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Huang, Han-I
Abstract
The Work environment impact scale（WEIS）is a semi-structured interview and rating scale based on the Model of Human Occupation and designed to assist the therapist to gather information on how individuals with physical or psychosocial disabilities experience and perceive their work environments.The WEIS contains 17 items which are rated by four-point scale. The aim of this study is to translate the WEIS into Chinese and to investigate the psychometric properties of the WEIS-Chinese version (WEIS-C) for the individuals with mental illness, the battered women, and the normal subjects (as a control group), including internal consistency, test-retest reliability, inter-rater reliability, construct validity, discriminatin validity, convergent and divergent validity.
Methods
The WEIS-C is finished by following the procedures of “forward translation, “back translation” and “committee approach”. To examine the psychometric qualities of the WEIS-C, 46 participants with mental illness, 14 battered women and 60 normal subjects are involved in the study. Furthermore, Taita Symptom Checklist List (TSCL), Chinese version of Basic Personality Inventory (C-BPI), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Job Satisfaction Scale, World Health Organization Quality of Life-Brief version (WHOQOL-BREF), Mastery Scale, Chinese version of Job Content Questionnaire (C-JCQ), the Occupational Self Assessment (OSA) and Social Support Questionnaire Short Form-Chinese version (SSQSF-C) were used to examine the convergent validity and the divergent validity and to understand the participants’ mental health status and personalities. To examine the test-retest reliability of the WEIS-C, a set of 40 participants in the control group were interviewed after 7 to 13 days from the first interview. The inter-rater reliability was tested by 6 occupational therapists who rated the same 10 participants in the control group with the WEIS-C rating scale. Rasch Analysis was used to investigate the construct validity of the WEIS-C and Classic Test Theory was used to examine the internal consistency, test-retest reliability, inter-rater reliability, discrimination validity, convergent and divergent validity of the WEIS-C.
Results
The WEIS-C appears to measure a single construct according to Rasch analysis. No DIF was found in genders, educational levels, the characteristics of the sample (persons with mental illness, battered women and the normal subjects) and different raters in the study. WEIS-C could discriminate the work environment impact among client and control groups by controlling the educational levels, gender and social economic status with ANCOVA (F=4.764、p=0.031). The convergent validity of the WEIS-C was supported by its significantly moderate to high correlations with C-JCQ (r=0.676, p=0.000) and the environment subscale of the OSA (r=0.414, p=0.000). However, the social interaction items of the WEIS-C has low correlation with SSQSF-C (r=0.233, p=0.010). The divergent validity of the WEIS-C was not supported by its high correlation with Mastery Scale（r=0.534，p=0.000）. The WEIS-C has a good internal consistency（Cronbach’s α = 0.866） , moderate inter-rater reliability（ICC = 0.597）,and excellent test-retest reliability（ICC = 0.998）. WEIS-C has significantly moderate negative correlations with BDI-II（r=-0.380，p=0.000）, BAI（r=-0.303，p=0.001） and TSCL （r=-0.396，p=0.000）. Moreover, WEIS-C has significantly high correlations with Job Satisfaction Scale（r=0.564，p=0.000） and WHOQOL-BREF（r=0.536，p=0.000）. Finally, WEIS-C has significantly moderate correlations with 7 subscales of the C-BPI which is Depression, Anxiety, Social Introversion, Self Depreciation, Persecutory, Thinking Disorder and Deviation (r=-0.305--0.454, p<0.05).
Discussion
The WEIS-C could be used to reliably and appropriately estimate how the work environment affects worker’s work performance, satisfaction and well-being and be used with groups of different characteristics (people with mental illness, abused women and normal subjects) in Taiwan with good psychometric properties. In addition, the study confirms that subjects with more negative perception of their work environment tend to have higher severity of depression, anxiety and psychiatric symptoms, worse quliaty of life and less job satisfaction. This finding suggests that occupational therapists, employment counselors and other related professionals should pay more attention to the work environment impacts on clients while doing vocational assessments. Moreover, subjects with some negative personalities tend to perceive their work environments negatively which is also found. Accordingly, therapists and other professionals should consider not only the client’s work environment, but also the fitness between his/her personality and the job.
The results in this study should be carefully generalized due to several limitations: (a) the sample was restricted to persons living in Northern Taiwan and recruited by convenience sampling. (b)The screening criteria of participants for test-retest reliability examination may lead to bias. (c) The small sample size of the abused women may cause limited external validity for victims of domestic violence in Taiwan. Further work is therefore required to ensure the measurement quality for abused women with larger sample size. Moreover, the work environment impact and its causation for different populations could be explored more by quality study using WEIS for in-depth knowledge.
Subjects
Work Environment Impact Scale
Model of Human Occupation
Rasch analysis
People with mental illness
Domestic violence
Type
thesis
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