Response: Letter to the Editor of IAOEH by BonKyoo Choi et al. (10.1007/s00420-013-0908-3)

Excerpt

In view of substantial research investments required for the establishment of validated scales of work stress models, such as Demand Control (Karasek et al. 1998) or effort–reward imbalance (Siegrist et al. 2004), it is unfortunate that in either case, many epidemiological studies used partial or proxy measures rather than full original scales. Yet, this was often justified as baseline assessments took place before original scales were available, or constraints of time and space did not allow the full application of scales. In order to develop statistically convincing individual participant data meta-analyses on work stress and health, the IPD-Work consortium set out to pool data from several epidemiological studies across Europe on the basis of harmonized measures of the Demand Control model (Fransson et al. 2012) and the effort–reward imbalance (ERI) model (Siegrist et al. 2013). …