Measuring psychosocial job strain with the job content questionnaire usingexperienced job evaluators

Background A union/management system of job evaluation has been in place in the British Columbia (BC) sawmill industry since the late 1960s. This syst em 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 indu stry, independently estimated psychosocial work conditions for 54 current j ob titles in a " typical " coastal sawmill using a shortened, 18-question v ersion of the JCQ questionnaire. Results Inter-rater reliability was acceptable for control but not for co-w orker 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 lowe st reliability for psychological job demand may be due to the imprecise con struct definition in the domain of the JCQ instrument. (C) 2001 Wiley-Liss. Inc.