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Dail L. Fields. Taking the Measure of Work: A Guide to Validated Scales for Organizational Research and Diagnosis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002, 352 pages, $69.95 hardcover.
Taking the Measure of Work is not a book that you sit down and read. Rather, it is a reference source, much like a dictionary or encyclopedia, that you consult for a particular purpose. In this case, the purpose is to locate psychological measures or scales for use in the workplace. To that end, this volume contains information on 137 workplace measures suitable for use in research and other activities that require assessment of people's experiences and perceptions of work. Descriptions and the scales themselves are logically organized into 10 chapters that include job attitudes (job satisfaction and organizational commitment), job characteristics, job stress, job roles, organizational justice, work-family conflict, person-organization fit, work behaviors, and work values.
The book begins with an overview prechapter that explains the purpose and rationale for the book, how measures were located, criteria for inclusion, and some psychometric issues. The book's purpose was to compile in one place a number of recently used measures that were sufficiently developed in terms of having adequate internal consistency and evidence for construct validity. Measures had to have at least three items and had to be fixed-choice scales. Omitted were ad hoc measures used for a single study with limited psychometric evidence provided. Some issues concerning evaluation of scales and interpretation of self-reports are briefly covered.
The remainder of the book consists of 10 chapters, all organized in the same way. Each begins with an overview of the construct/domain of interest. This provides some definitions of the constructs and some theoretical background that helps to interpret them. Some chapters dealt with measures of the same or quite similar constructs (e.g., job satisfaction), whereas others were more broad (e.g., job characteristics). For each scale, a constant framework was provided, with subsections covering a description, reliability, validity,...