European Working Conditions Telephone Survey 2021

A high-quality questionnaire is a key element of a successful survey: therefore, Eurofound invests heavily in questionnaire 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.

For the European Working Conditions Telephone Survey (EWCTS) carried out in 2021, the approach was slightly different; although the questionnaire was based on the interrupted EWCS 2020 face-to-face survey, due to the mode change to telephone interviewing the questionnaire had to be adapted to this new approach. As for previous surveys, the new EWCTS questionnaire addresses emerging challenges and policy issues of interest in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gender mainstreaming as always was a guiding principle in preparing the questionnaire.

Topics covered

The EWCTS aims to capture workers' concrete experiences and covers the following topics:

• Employee and self-employed at work, new entrants

• Workers by life stages

• Work (as an activity) characteristics: place of work, (direct) customer work, use of information and communication technologies (ICT), number of contractual working hours

• Job quality: physical and social environment, job tasks, organisational characteristics, work time arrangements, job prospects and intrinsic aspects

• Forms of work organisation, the collective determinants of work, employee representation, social climate

• Hybrid work

• Work–family conflicts

• Time use and work–life balance

• Experience of gender segregation

• Health and safety at risk

• Predictable earnings and making ends meet

• Well-being at work, engagement at work and burnout

The EWCTS 2021 questionnaire was adapted from the original questionnaire developed for the EWCS 2020 .

To adapt the survey from face-to-face to telephone interviewing, the length of the original face-to-face questionnaire had to be shortened. To achieve this reduction, substantive cuts were made, and parts of the questionnaire were modularised, meaning that in those parts, each respondent was asked only a subset of the questions.

The selection of questions on job quality was guided by the work of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Guidelines on measuring the quality of the working environment(opens in new tab)This link opens in a new tab which include two sets of questions on the working environment.

• The condensed module asks 13 questions pertaining to 11 job characteristics; this module was added to the core part of the EWCTS questionnaire. The quality of the working environment indicator is calculated based on this condensed module.

• The extended module aims to conduct a more comprehensive assessment of the working environment; these questions are collected in Module 1 (M1 in the table below).

The items included in the modules are those that are most relevant to workers’ well-being and those with the strongest evidence for their statistical reliability.

The table below shows the general design of the telephone interview questionnaire. It is composed of three parts. One is fixed and mandatory for all respondents while the other two are modularised. Each respondent answered three sections of the questionnaire: the core questionnaire, one version of Module 1 and one version of Module 2.

The allocation of respondents to groups was randomised so that every respondent had the same probability of being asked one of the modularised questions.

To ensure the success of a survey such as the EWCS, the language versions of the questionnaire for 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. Comparability or equivalence are a high priority as a straightforward word-for-word translation may not result in comparable data.

The language versions of the questionnaire for the EWCTS 2021 were based on the questionnaires already produced for the interrupted EWCS 2020 face-to-face survey which had undergone a rigorous, state-of-the-art translation procedure based on 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

For the EWCTS 2021, a total of 55 language versions of the questionnaire were developed for the 36 countries covered (EU Member States, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Norway, Switzerland, United Kingdom). A modified TRAPD approach was used given the limited number of changes which were made to the new questionnaire.

Where the same language is spoken in more than one country but with differences in language use between countries, harmonisation was applied. In this process, the translations drafted for each country were compared with the other translations of the same language before finalisation. In total, 11 language versions underwent harmonisation.

For languages used in multiple countries but which are very similar, the process of adaptation was applied. This included the initial translation prepared by the country where there is a greater number of speakers of the language and its adaptation for local use in the other countries sharing the language. In total, 18 languages versions underwent adaptation.

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