Application of item response theory to achieve cross‐cultural comparability of occupational stress measurement

Abstract

Our objective was to examine cross-cultural comparability of standard scales of the Effort-Reward Imbalance occupational stress scales by item response theory (IRT) analyses. Data were from 20,256 Japanese employees, 1464 Dutch nurses and nurses' aides, 2128 representative employees from post-communist countries, 963 Swedish representative employees, 421 Chinese female employees, 10,175 employees of the French national gas and electric company and 734 Spanish railroad employees, sanitary personnel and telephone operators. The IRT likelihood ratio model was used for differential item functioning (DIF) and differential test functioning (DTF) analyses. Despite the existence of DIF, most comparisons did not show discernible differences in the relations between Effort-Reward total score and level of the underlying trait across cultural groups. In the case that DTF was suspected, excluding an item with significant DIF improved the comparability. The full cross-cultural comparability of Effort-Reward Imbalance scores can be achieved with the help of IRT analysis.

Validity of the effort/reward imbalance questionnaire in health professionals from six Latin‐American countries

“…Most of the correlations with these items in this study were acceptable (>0.30). Unlike previous cross-cultural comparability analyses of the ERIQ [Tsutsumi et al, 2009], items ERI 4 ("I am often pressured to work overtime") and the effort scale were not problematic in this study. The results of multigroup CFAs supported structural and metric invariance, which suggests the underlying effort construct is well represented by the selected items in the six Latin-American samples and reveals that the health professionals from the six countries interpret and respond to the items in a similar way (cross-cultural validity).…”

The Persian version of locomotor capabilities index: translation, reliability and validity in individuals with lower limb amputation

“…The authors acknowledge that they did not assess the cross-language differential item functioning, comparing LCI-5 items between two Persian and English languages. It would require a large number of potential analyses based on item response theory method [35] and a much larger sample size than the present study.…”

Validating abbreviated measures of effort-reward imbalance at work in European cohort studies: the IPD-Work consortium

“…Another study compared the original ERI scales and a proxy measure within a Swedish working population, again with reasonable comparability (Fahlen 2004). Moreover, in depth analyses based on item response theory were conducted by Tsutsumi and colleagues using cross-national data from different studies (Tsutsumi 2009). The results indicated a sufficient cross-country comparability of standard scales.…”