Q: How can I score and norm Workplace Stressors Assessment Questionnaire?

Detailed Question -

I used an instrument called Workplace Stressors Assessment Questionnaire by Mahmood, Coins, Guy, Pettelier in my thesis. However, I cannot find a manual to guide me how to score and norm. Without understanding how to score and norm this test, I cannot proceed after data gathering. Please help.

1 Answer to this question
Answer:

Great to know that you’ve started with your thesis. A thesis can be a long journey, and it doesn’t help when there are hurdles such as the one you are facing. :) Anyway, hopefully, we can sort you out with the question. Additionally, we have provided some resources at the end of this response for help with writing your thesis and also data analysis so that you can make faster progress once your query is resolved.

Mahmood et al. (2010) developed the Workplace Stressors Assessment Questionnaire (WSAQ), a self-completed questionnaire for the assessment of work stress-related factors. Their paper is behind a paywall, which is why you might be facing difficulties to access the full text. Nevertheless, guides for scoring have been made available by some researchers. For instance, this external page provides a stepwise guide for this, which we have described in brief as follows.

There are 22 questions in six subsections (Demands, Control, Support, Role, Relationships, and Rewards), each of which has a Likert scale score from 1 to 5, i.e., 1 = agree to 5 = strongly disagree, or 1 = never to 5 = always (when investigating frequency).

The total score of each subsection is calculated by adding the individual scores of the questions therein. Next, the calculated score of each subsection is adjusted by multiplication with certain factors (shown in the equation below). The total score of each WSAQ is finally obtained by multiplying the adjusted scores of the subsections with 0.95. This can be expressed as follows:

Total Score = 0.95 × [(Demands × 0.84) + (Control × 0.86) + (Support × 0.77) + (Role × 0.83) + (Relationships × 0.74) + (Rewards × 0.86)].

Hopefully, this should address your question on scoring. You have also asked about norming. However, we did not come across any available guide on norming for this particular questionnaire. We suggest you go over the original proposal for this questionnaire (found here) to understand the norming method for this research instrument. Traditional norming is used for norms calculation in tests such as psychological tests. It assumes normally distributed test variables and identifies every test score distribution with the mean and standard deviation. Usually, raw scores of a test score distribution are normalized via percentile scores to transform the distribution into a z-score normal distribution.

Additionally, you may find the below resources helpful for your thesis writing:

And for further help with experimental design and statistics, you may learn more about our relevant services here:

We hope that this provides some clarity and will help you in your data analysis. :)

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