EWCTS 2021  - Questionnaire development

The EWCTS 2021 questionnaire was adapted from the original questionnaire developed for the EWCS 2020 .

To adapt the survey from face-to-face to telephone interviewing, the length of the original face-to-face questionnaire had to be shortened. To achieve this reduction, substantive cuts were made, and parts of the questionnaire were modularised, meaning that in those parts, each respondent was asked only a subset of the questions.

The selection of questions on job quality was guided by the work of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Guidelines on measuring the quality of the working environment which include two sets of questions on the working environment.

• The condensed module asks 13 questions pertaining to 11 job characteristics; this module was added to the core part of the EWCTS questionnaire. The quality of the working environment indicator is calculated based on this condensed module.
• The extended module aims to conduct a more comprehensive assessment of the working environment; these questions are collected in Module 1 (M1 in the table below).

The items included in the modules are those that are most relevant to workers’ well-being and those with the strongest evidence for their statistical reliability.

The table below shows the general design of the telephone interview questionnaire. It is composed of three parts. One is fixed and mandatory for all respondents while the other two are modularised. Each respondent answered three sections of the questionnaire: the core questionnaire, one version of Module 1 and one version of Module 2.

The allocation of respondents to groups was randomised so that every respondent had the same probability of being asked one of the modularised questions.