title: Measuring psychosocial job strain with the job content questionnaire using experienced job evaluators.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  A union/management system of job evaluation has been in place in the British Columbia (BC) sawmill industry since the late 1960s. This system uses an instrument, very similar to the job content questionnaire (JCQ) to evaluate psychosocial work conditions for sawmill jobs.
  
  
  METHODS
  Four experienced evaluators, one from the union and three from industry, independently estimated psychosocial work conditions for 54 current job titles in a "typical" coastal sawmill using a shortened, 18-question version of the JCQ questionnaire.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Inter-rater reliability was acceptable for control but not for co-worker social support, physical demand, or psychological demand. Reliability was least for psychological demand.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Experienced job evaluators in the sawmill industry were able to reliably estimate only the control dimension of the JCQ. The observed lowest reliability for psychological job demand may be due to the imprecise construct definition in the domain of the JCQ instrument.
authors.affiliation: Department of Health Care and Epidemiology, Vancouver BC, Canada. ostry@unixg.ubc.ca
authors.forename: A S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Ostry
authors.forename: S A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Marion
authors.forename: P A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Demers
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hershler
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kelly
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Teschke
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hertzman
mesh_terms: D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006801:Humans; D015588:Observer Variation; D016272:Occupational Health; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000175:diagnosis*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D017132:Workplace / Q000523:psychology*