Development of the child care worker job stress inventory

After a series of instrument development studies, a mail survey was conduct ed with 196 randomly selected family day care providers (FDCPs) and child c are center workers (CCCWs) residing in the state of Maryland (response rate s were 76.6% and 70.5%, respectively). Embedded in the instrument were thre e job stress scales, specific to child care workers, measuring job demands, job control, and job resources. Extensive psychometric testing of the thre e 17-item instruments demonstrated several areas of strength. The job deman ds scale, because of its breadth of stressors covered, fared slightly worse on indicators of reliability (alpha = 0.77; mean interitem correlation [MI C] = 0.17; item-to-total correlations [ITCs] = 0.14 to 0.49) than did job c ontrol (alpha = 0.88; MIC = 0.31; ITCs = 0.26 to 0.69) and job resources (a lpha = 0.89; MIC = 0.35; ITCs = 0.32 to 0.70). Known groups validity was de monstrated through a conceptually meaningful pattern of differences between FDCPs and CCCWs. Construct validity for all three scales was demonstrated by a pattern of stronger correlations with conceptually similar versus diss imilar instruments. Average correlations with similar versus dissimilar ins truments were: job demands, 0.54 versus 0.24; job control, 0.74 versus 0.30 ; and job resources, -0.53 versus 0.30. Similar to the reliability analysis , results of factor analysis were stronger for job control and job resource s than for job demands.