#0010 Validation of the Job Content Questionnaire among hospital nurses in Vietnam
Is the Widely Used Job Contents Questionnaire Effective Among Nurses in Vietnam Too?
The rapidly ageing population of South-East Asian countries is posing new challenges to the healthcare systems and medical staff there. Nurses in these countries are becoming overburdened and commonly suffer from work-related stress, with many reporting poor mental health. Understanding the everyday work environments of nurses is the first step toward finding effective measures to address their problems and concerns.
The Job Contents Questionnaire (JCQ), developed in 1998, has proved to be a powerful tool for measuring various aspects of the workplace as seen through the eyes of the workers. However, the JCQ has not been used much in low and lower-middle income countries in South-East Asia, and its validity and reliability among nurses in such countries is unknown.
We, therefore, conducted a study aimed at verifying whether the JCQ is a valid tool for nurses in Vietnam, where over 45% of nurses have reported poor mental health symptoms like depression or anxiety.
We began by translating 22 items of the original JCQ into Vietnamese and distributing it to 1258 nurses at a general hospital in Vietnam. Based on the 949 complete responses received, we checked the internal consistency and structure of the JCQ and compared the JCQ results with those obtained using DASS 21 (Depression Anxiety Stress Scale 21), a well-established surveying instrument.
Overall, we found that our Vietnamese JCQ could be used with some validity and reliability to examine the psychosocial aspects of the work environment of nurses in Vietnam. We further analyzed the more problematic items in the questionnaire and explored various ways of improving them.
This study is important because the JCQ could become a powerful tool to objectively understand what nurses in South-East Asian lower-middle income countries are going through in their workplaces, which should be the first step before solutions are suggested and implemented. Additionally, further studies could extend the JCQ to other types of jobs and settings, hopefully enabling a wave of positive changes in different work environments worldwide.
Â
Link to the original journal article:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/1348-9585.12086
Title of the paper:
Validation of the Job Content Questionnaire among hospital nurses in Vietnam
Authors:
Natsu Sasaki, Kotaro Imamura, Tran T. T. Thuy, Kazuhiro Watanabe, Nguyen T. Huong, Kazuto Kuribayashi, Asuka Sakuraya, Bui M. Thu, Nguyen T. Quynh, Nguyen T. Kien, Nguyen T. Nga, Nguyen T. H. Giang, Truong Q. Tien, Harry Minas, Melvyn Zhang, Akizumi Tsutsumi, Norito Kawakami
