EWCS 2015 - Questionnaire

A high quality questionnaire is a key element of a successful survey: therefore, Eurofound invests heavily in development and translation. Each time the European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) is run, the questionnaire is revised with the support of experts and policy actors, and the guidance of Eurofound’s stakeholders.

The sixth EWCS questionnaire includes questions from previous surveys to enable analysis over time. It also contains new questions that address emerging challenges and policy issues of interest. In developing the questionnaire – and in its analysis – gender mainstreaming has been a guiding principle.

The EWCS aims to capture workers' concrete experience. It includes the following topics:

• physical and psychosocial risk factors
• working time: duration, organisation, predictability and flexibility; work–life balance
• place of work
• speed of work, pace determinants
• employee participation, human resource policies and work organisation  (such as task rotation); employee representation
• skills use, cognitive dimensions of work, decision-making authority, and learning in work
• employment conditions: job security and insecurity
• social relations at work: support, trust, cooperation, discrimination, violence
• gender issues: segregation, household composition, unpaid’ work, extent of women in supervisory positions
• well-being and health, earnings and financial security.

Language versions used in each country covered by the EWCS are available.

The sixth EWCS questionnaire includes questions from previous surveys to enable analysis over time as well as new questions addressing emerging challenges and policy issues of interest.

The main topics it covers are employment conditions, job security, working time, place of work, work organisation and human resources practices, risk factors (physical and psychosocial), social relationships at work, pace of work, health and safety at work, work–life balance and household characteristics, financial security, health and well being.

New topics covered include company size, country of birth, part-time or full-time status of partner, on-call work, the heterogeneity of self-employment, occurrence of  chronic diseases, sleeping problems, recent changes in the job, organisational justice, employee representation and engagement, and fairness of pay.

The development of the questionnaire started approximately two years before fieldwork. It has built on the following foundations:

• feedback from users and lessons from previous editions of the EWCS series;
• extensive consultation with Eurofound’s tripartite stakeholders, other EU bodies (European Commission, Eurostat, EU-OSHA, EIGE), international experts (OECD, ILO),  and experts in working conditions surveys and other research and policy areas relevant to the survey;
• the analysis of European policy documents as well as a specific literature review (for example, on self-employment, and engagement at the workplace);
• cognitive testing to assess how well the questions work: did respondents’ understand the terms used? Had they had the same meaning for different groups? Were they easy to answer?
• an assessment of the translatability to identify cultural issues and potential aspects that could be hard to translate.

Eurofound has produced a historical overview, which maps the development of the questionnaire over time. It contains all the questions that have ever been asked in all five surveys, organised by topic and chronologically. 

To ensure the success of a survey like the EWCS, the language versions of the questionnaire to be used in each country must be of high quality. Since consistency and accuracy are key elements of a successful comparative survey, Eurofound implements intensive, rigorous translation procedures to achieve the best translations possible. Part of the approach taken in translation was to look for comparability or equivalence: a straightforward word-for-word translation might not have resulted in comparable data.

The translation process took place in five main phases:

1. assessment of the translatability of the source questionnaire;
2. training sessions for translators and adjudicators;
3. translation of the source questionnaire using the translation, review, adjudication, pre-testing and documentation (TRAPD) approach;
4. translation of all other fieldwork materials;
5. translation pre-test.

The sixth EWCS covers 35 European countries – EU28, Norway, Switzerland, Albania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey. In total, 49 language versions of the questionnaire have been developed. Where the same language is spoken in more than one country, harmonisation or adaptation was applied depending on circumstances. 

The translation report describes in detail the steps leading to the translation and finalisation of all language versions. 

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