Construction and Validation of Occupational Stress Scale for Public Prosecutors

Abstract

Occupational stress has the adverse effects on personal and work-related life of workers. Public prosecutors experience specific stressors at work, but no scale has yet been designed to measure occupational stress among public prosecutors. The present study was carried out to construct and validate an indigenous Occupational Stress Scale for Public Prosecutors in Pakistan. An inductive approach was used for item generation. After ensuring the construct fidelity and content validity: the items of the scale were subjected to principal axis factoring, using a varimax rotation method on a sample of 416 public prosecutors and 32 items were retained in a well-defined 5 factor structure, which collectively accounted for 54.39 percent of the variance. Moreover, a confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of 350 public prosecutors was performed through AMOS modeling and the final scale consisted of 26 items was obtained. The relationship of scale with job satisfaction was found to be the negative (r = -.30, p<.01) that determined its divergent validity. Furthermore, the relationship of the scale with Health and Safety Executive Management Standard Indicator Tool was found to be the positive (r = .52, p<.01) that determined its convergent validity. The final scale is a promising measure with good items homogeneity, internal consistency and optimum validity