Statistical approaches to the analysis of the psychosocial environment

The Stress-Energy (SE) Questionnaire is a Swedish instrument developed to measure two critical aspects of mood at work, and has been used in many studies. The research project concerns the validity of a modified version of the SE-questionnaire including mood assessment at home/leisure time as well. Assessments by the Stress-Energy Questionnaire like many other questionnaires produce ordinal data, having rank-invariant properties only. The non-metric properties of ordinal data are traditionally ignored, and calculations of sum scores and means values have a strong tradition. One aim of the research is to suggest global stress and energy index scores that take into account the rank invariant properties of the data.