Validity and Reliability of the Upper Extremity Work Demands Scale.
Nora W Jacobs, Redmar J Berduszek, Pieter U Dijkstra and 1 others
PMID 27848067WHAT IT FOUND
The eight-item self-report questionnaire for upper-extremity work demands was stable over about two weeks and grouped into force/posture and repetition.
It agreed only modestly with one-hour direct observation, so scores should not be treated as exact exposure.
Key findings
01Total scores were almost the same when the questionnaire was completed about two weeks apart.
02The self-reported score showed only a moderate relationship with one-hour observation.
03The items grouped into two subscales, force and posture and repetition, with good internal consistency.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The one-hour observation may not represent a whole job, especially for workers with many different tasks. There is no accepted gold standard for upper-extremity work demands, so the moderate correlation with observation may reflect the observation method as much as the questionnaire. The heaviest work category was not included, so the scale was not tested in workers who do very heavy upper-limb work. The original Dutch and English versions of the source questionnaire did not use forward and backward translation. Some participants were unsure whether item 5 referred to wrist and hand position or body position, so the item was ambiguous. No minimal important change is available, so a 5-point change cannot be judged as clinically useful.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use this scale to conclude that a patient's upper-extremity symptoms were caused by work demands. The study tested measurement properties, not relationships with disorders, and agreement with observation was only moderate.