Psychosocial Risk Assessment at work – an international validation study of the Questionnaire for Psychosocial Risk Assessment (QPRA)

Abstract

Due to the increasing number of mental and behavioral disorders, most countries of the European Union have adopted laws and regulations regarding the prevention of psychological ill-health at work. These regulations include the requirement to systematically assess psychosocial work risks, which demands valid and reliable assessment tools. This study explored the validity of the Questionnaire for Psychosocial Risk Assessment at work (QPRA, Dettmers & Krause, 2020) in French and Spanish. We applied rigorous forward-backward translation procedures and culture-sensitive adaptions to ensure the content validity of this risk assessment tool in the different language contexts. Based on a final sample of 166 French, 107 Spanish, and 4210 German full-time employees, we compared item and scale statistics and used multigroup confirmatory factor analysis to test the factor structure and measurement invariance across languages. Furthermore, we examined the relationships between the assessed job characteristics (job stressors and resources) and indicators of employee-work related (ill-)health (emotional exhaustion and work engagement). Preliminary results indicated the need for revising single items to enhance linguistic usage. For the revised language versions, simple item and scale statistics as well scale correlations with theoretically related outcomes, such as emotional exhaustion and work engagement, provided evidence that the instrument produced reliable and valid measurement scores across language versions. Confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) could only be tested for the German and French language version, but not for the Spanish version. Multiple group cfa supported the assumption of strong measurement invariance of the French and the original German version. Future studies should increase the Spanish sample to attain the final assessment of its validity.