JCQ and JCQ2 / Karasek Job Content Questionnaire
The JCQ 2: A new world of work
Difference between JCQ and JCQ2
JCQ and JCQ2 / Karasek Job Content Questionnaire is based on world’s best-known stress theory, with thousands of research articles supporting validity internationally. JCQ and JCQ2 is a questionnaire-based instrument designed to measure the "content" of a respondent's work tasks in a general manner which is applicable to all jobs and jobholders.
JCQ and JCQ2 covers critical workplace issues that are often overlooked - because they are very difficult to assess - including employee health risks, chronic disease, depression, sickness-absence, disability - and also job satisfaction, active work/creativity, and innovation potential. The JCQ makes effective assessment possible - via our level of standardization, explanatory power, access, and international reputation. Our JCQ benchmark Scale Scores, are “uniquely comparable”, because of standardization across job positions, companies, and countries globally. These very useful possibilities are the result of a five-step method evolved over several decades with our multi-language JCQ development process.
JCQ Scores fit a very simple “narrative explanation” based on R. Karasek’s Demand/Control Model’s: Job Strain, Active Work. Using the JCQ2, Task & Organization-level Demands, Task & Organization level Control and Task and Organization level Stability-Support all now multi-level generalized, but still consistent with this core narrative. This allows both: enhanced problem assessment precision – and - broad key-actor understanding and more feasible policy-action pathways in companies.
Benchmark Scores come from a five-step process:
- Proprietary simple–to-answer questions;
- Proprietary scoring with easy interpretability;
- A uniquely well-validated prediction model for both employee health risks and job satisfaction / innovation potential
- A powerful integrating ”explanatory narrative” across different occupation levels and company groups
- Extensive research on international comparability of scales cores (Karasek, et al, JOHP, 1998).
JCQ scale benchmarks add-value by facilitating effective action plans for: (a) workplace health risks (Karasek’s Job Strain): chronic disease, depression, sickness-absence, disability - and (b) for innovation facilitation at companies (Karasek’s Active Work: job satisfaction, retention, and motivated, innovative work).
JCQ1 – is the best-known, globally-used and scientifically proven instrument to measure employee work organization and psychosocial job content (Hurrell, JOHP, 1998). It covers a wide variety of employee job characteristic areas including : Decision Latitude, Psychological Job Demands, Job Insecurity, Supervisor and Coworker Support. Its benchmark scores have a world-wide reputation.
The JCQ1 has so far been mainly used as an academic research/university-based research instrument, and has focused on the worker’s task alone.
The New JCQ2 – measures work content in a standardized and globally usable way - NOW for the first time - at COMPANY level as well.
The JCQ2 enables a company-focus – and has the necessary flexibility to accommodate our complex global economy. Companies can now use the JCQ2 to help resolve their stress-prevention problems and facilitate innovative-promoting work engagement.
The conceptual framework underlying the JCQ allows its application in social policy as a measure of work quality, in addition to the more commonly assessed work quantity issues: wages, hours, and benefits. Broader economic development issues of skill utilization as well as social costs of market-based economic development are beginning to be addressed using the instrument.
The design of the JCQ instrument in 1984 focused on a very short, efficient questionnaire which could be self-administered in fifteen minutes, with minimal subject guidance. The JCQ was originally constructed for the Framingham Offspring Study developed for the US NHLBI survey and the instrument authors were well aware of the limitations posed by research teams in nation survey designs and of other researchers adopting question sets not of their own design - thus instrument length was a major design criteria.
Most of the scales have nationally standardizable scores, allowing users involved in small population or single plant studies to compare their findings to national averages on the scales (broken down by sex and occupation/industry). The scales are also used in our data base linkage system (using job title) through which job content scores can be associated with health and productivity outcomes in national or company data bases. This assures the continued validation of the instrument's scales in predicting a broad range of outcome variables.
Furthermore, we have designed this questionnaire as the first part of a two-part strategy. The JCQ is the reference base of a two part "umbrella" strategy for collecting job data. Users are encouraged to develop the second part themselves – adding their own company/project-specific questions. Or use our JCQ Center Global consultation function for help to add more situation-specific supplementary scales. This process uses the Job Content Scale umbrella as a reference to assess the detailed problems important in the specific surveyed work site. These new scales/questions can then be correlated to our nationally standardized scales.
The JCQ has been translated into over 29+ languages all copyrighted by professor R. Karasek JCQ Center Global and permission for use has to be requested here.
Features: The JCQ is an instrument with an international reputation, a simple narrative and a standardized product at a global scale
- The largest world coverage for psychosocial work content (many scales): stress risks and innovation
- 29+ languages.
- Comprehensive, integrating and scientifically validated explanations and very broad international standardization
- Broad international usage
- Comprehensive, integrating explanation for our measurements (not only a general communication tools)
Length: 36-49 questions - The instrument has an originally recommended length of 49 questions. The JCQ survey can be made spending much less than half an hour of the working time in an organization and the results are provided by our online system – it’s easy to both measure and then also interpret, understand and use the measurements - and to log in to our service later and make a new measurement if changes have been applied.
Average completion time: 15-30 minutes depending on which version of the questionnaire you choose
Administration: Group administration is recommended
JCQ & JCQ2 Method: Simple online questions, easy for employees to answer
Sample card (example of questions)
The best-known scales:
-Decision Latitude (a combined scale of Skill Discretion and Decision Authority)
-Psychological Demands,
-Social Support (a combined scale of Supervisor and Coworker Support)
These are used to measure the high-demand/low-control/low-support model of job strain development
The demand/control model predicts, first, stress-related risk and, second, active-passive behavioral correlates of jobs.
Other aspects of work demands are assessed as well:
-Physical Demands and
-Job Insecurity.
No personality scales or measures of non-job stressors are included. These are two areas in which the user may want to supplement our instrument or ask JCQ Center Global for support consultancy.
All scales can be used for microlevel, job characteristic analytic purposes, such as assessing the relative risks of individuals' exposures to different work settings to predict job-related illness development, psychological distress, coronary heart disease, musculoskeletal disease, and reproductive disorders. The scales also allow testing of hypotheses about activation, work motivation, job satisfaction, absenteeism, and labor turnover and have been used for such studies.
The JCQ 2: A new world of work
JCQ2 is a unique new instrument. There is no other work-organization multi-level questionnaire – which can easily allow integration task level, organization level and even external to work effects. Worker’s job content is assessed at the job level AND at the company level. This increases in the number of measurement scales substantially which in turn increases precision and predictive power in problem-analysis and solution focus. Newer the less the JCQ2 retains an extremely easy-to-understand explanatory interface, newly configured to address the multilevel challenges of our global economy.
Our NEW JCQ2 grows out of the JCQ1 to allow time-related comparisons, but now adds four times as many measurements, still in an easy-to-administer and globally validated package. These new scales are needed to add assessment at the organization–level (not just the job-level), and to assess the effects of work and company organization in the rapidly changing global economy. To do this the JCQ2 adds additional scales, for example: dynamic interfaces for worker/customer skill building, new social emotional demands and hazards, assessment of company fairness, and decision-making inclusiveness and organizational instability, social trust in teams, at the organizational level, and many components of job insecurity in the now global labor market.
Profound changes have occurred in the way work is organized and carried out around the world in the last decades due to globalization and strong free market-based socio-economic policy. In many contemporary workplaces the job task alone has relatively diminished effects, whereas higher-level work related social organizational factors, such as the organization level and external-to-work social structure factors, have gained importance for worker well-being and stress-related outcomes and solution guidelines. At the same time these same organization/company policy contexts themselves are now compelled to evolve to become more dynamically adaptable and flexible to enable the organizations to survive in our global, location-dispersed, yet powerfully financially internet-integrated economy. Workers more often find themselves directly facing turbulent company contexts, and unknowable global economic forces – with increasing risks of unstable working conditions and job insecurity.
Thus the appropriate understanding of the job’s contexts, themselves undergoing rapid change, requires a more elaborated understanding of both adaptability and stability. These context realities must also be addressed to provide a comprehensive platform for humane and effective work redesign goals - an organizational theory platform, which evolves beyond the original D/C model’s. In a world that is increasingly dominated by global-dispersion of highly uniform work organization principles, management solutions and economic policies we offer a cross-culturally valid theory.
To maintain effective prediction of work and well-being outcomes requires a major expansion of the JCQ and major generalizations of the underlying theory. The JCQ2 extends the original JCQ1 instrument with its task-level focus on the demand-control-support model (DCS model), to those aspects of work experience that lie beyond the task (and even beyond the organization), increasingly important in the global context. The original JCQ's Demand-Control-Support model (D/C/S model) is extended to those aspects of work experience - ever more important in our real world today. Thus, the JCQ2 includes many new scales: both expanded Task level scales, and new Organization and External level scales - with substantially enhanced predictive power. This multiple, 3-level work-effects assessment format allows testing and confirmation of the much more general and thus potentially more powerful version of the D/C/S Model: based on Stress-Disequilibrium and Conducivity Theory: the new Associationalist D/C Model version (the A-D/C Model).
These new scales are needed to add assessment at the organization–level (not just the job-level), and to assess the effects of work and company organization in the rapidly changing global economy. To address dynamic changes in current work organization the A-D/C Model theory introduces key issues of coordination, association of parts, and high-level ordering capacity that become the basis of new work organization concepts - Platforms of Dynamic Stability and Equilibrium of Flows - which allow development of broad new definitions of stress (system decay) and growth (system growth). These general principles address four important current work environment challenge areas: multi-level work stress; stability in the face of change and work predictability; and person and organizational growth, job crafting, meaning in work; and job security risks in the global economy. These new theory elements are then used to support our specific JCQ2 scale definitions at the task, organization, and external-to-work levels.
There are three important goals for the evolution of the JCQ 2 and for its ADC theoretical platform. First is to maintain the pragmatically and intellectually useful Demand-Control (D/C) dual narrative, which addresses both negative (health deficit/disease) outcomes - and positive (active, motivational, learning-related) outcomes that are increasingly important in economic policy, and essential to D/C implicit job redesign narrative. Second is to more directly assess job context. Third, is to maintain the international generalizability of its constructs and measures, in spite of the obvious existence of vast inter-country and inter-cultural differences.
The new JCQ2 questionnaire updates the JCQ1 for the complex organizational structures of a globalized economy - the result of a 10-year development process with international pilot tests on 17,000 subjects. Completed with 17,000 German, Australian, Chinese and Korean subjects - dramatically expanding the product for a Theory: the new Associationalist D/C Model version (the A-D/C Model).
These new scales are needed to add assessment at the organization–level (not just the job-level), and to assess the effects of work and company organization in the rapidly changing global economy. To address dynamic changes in current work organization the A-D/C Model theory introduces key issues of coordination, association of parts, and high-level ordering capacity that become the basis of new work organization concepts - Platforms of Dynamic Stability and Equilibrium of Flows - which allow development of broad new definitions of stress (system decay) and growth (system growth). These general principles address four important current work environment challenge areas: multi-level work stress; stability in the face of change and work predictability; and person and organizational growth, job crafting, meaning in work; and job security risks in the global economy. These new theory elements are then used to support our specific JCQ2 scale definitions at the task, organization, and external-to-work levels.
There are three important goals for the evolution of the JCQ 2 and for its ADC theoretical platform. First is to maintain the pragmatically and intellectually useful Demand-Control (D/C) dual narrative, which addresses both negative (health deficit/disease) outcomes - and positive (active, motivational, learning-related) outcomes that are increasingly important in economic policy, and essential to D/C implicit job redesign narrative. Second is to more directly assess job context. Third, is to maintain the international generalizability of its constructs and measures, in spite of the obvious existence of vast inter-country and inter-cultural differences.
The new JCQ2 questionnaire updates the JCQ1 for the complex organizational structures of a globalized economy - the result of a 10-year development process with international pilot tests on 17,000 subjects. Completed with 17,000 German, Australian, Chinese and Korean subjects - dramatically expanding the product for a globalized economy. The new questionnaire expands from 6 to 24 scales and now support our instrument’s comprehensive use in companies – for studies of groups of employees. JCQ2 are copyrighted by professor Karasek and permission for use has to be requested online Usage Request Information Form on our official website here
Features: The JCQ2 is an instrument with an international reputation, a simple narrative and a standardized product at a global scale.
Average completion time: 15-30 minutes depending on which version of the questionnaire you choose
Administration: Group administration is recommended
JCQ & JCQ2 Method: Simple online questions, easy for employees to answer
Sample card (example of questions):
Difference between JCQ and JCQ2
JCQ2 adds additional scales, for example:
-dynamic interfaces for worker/customer skill building,
-new social emotional demands and hazards
-assessment of company fairness
-decision-making inclusiveness
-organizational instability
-social trust in teams, at the organizational level
-and many components of job insecurity in the now global labor market.
The JCQ1 and JCQ2 are both premised on the Demand/Control (D/C) theory, however the JCQ1 is an instrument designed to measure psychosocial characteristics of jobs mainly at the task or job level. It has satisfactory reliability and validity in assessing the theoretical constructs and predicting positive and negative outcomes (illnesses and behaviors), across occupations, cultures and countries.
The JCQ 2 has developed out of an extensive international collaborative process, beginning in 2002 with researcher workshops reviewing JCQ shortcomings, a new goal statement, a multi-year sequence of international instrument development workshops, leading to four international pilots involving 16,000 respondents.
The original JCQ1 scales are extended in the JCQ 2 to provide the additional precision and multi-level coverage of psychosocial work organization.
At the task level, the JCQ 2 has 10 scales (vs. 6 in the JCQ1): one duplicates the classic JCQ1 “core;” five others revise the classic core scales, and four new scales are added (one close to the existing literature, three others newly constituted as scales). At the organizational level, the JCQ 2 has now 8 new scales (vs. none in the JCQ1): three close to the existing literature, and five theoretically derived and newly constituted scales. At the external-to-work level, the JCQ 2 now has 7 scales.
