Transcultural adaptation to Brazilian Portuguese and reliability of the effort-reward imbalance in household and family work

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: To describe the steps in the transcultural adaptation of the scale in the Effortreward imbalance model to household and family work to the Brazilian context.METHODS: We performed the translation, back-translation, and initial psychometric evaluationof the questionnaire that comprised three dimensions: (i) effort (eight items, emphasizingquantitative workload), (ii) reward (11 items that seek to capture the intrinsic value of familyand household work, societal esteem, recognition from the spouse/partner, and affection fromthe children), and (iii) overcommitment ( four items related to intrinsic effort). The scale wasincluded in a sectional study conducted with 1,045 nursing workers. A subsample of 222 subjectsanswered the questionnaire for a second time, seven to 15 days thereafter. The data were collectedbetween October 2012 and May 2013. The internal consistency of the scale was evaluated usingCronbach’s alpha and test-retest reliability analysis, square weighted kappa, prevalence and biasadjusted Kappa, and intraclass correlation coefficient.RESULTS: Prevalence and bias-adjusted Kappa (ka) of the scale dimensions ranged from 0.80-0.83 for overcommitment, 0.78-0.90 for effort, and 0.76-0.93 for reward. In most dimensions, thevalues of minimum and maximum scores, average, standard deviation, and Cronbach’s alphawere similar in test and retest scores. Only on societal esteem subdimension (reward) was therelittle variation in standard deviation (test score of 2.24 and retest score of 3.36) and in Cronbach’salpha coefficient (test score of 0.38 and retest score of 0.59).CONCLUSIONS: The Brazilian version of the scale was found to have proper reliability indicesregarding time stability, which suggests adapting it to be used in population with characteristicsthat are similar to the one in this study