jawsover

Overview of the Job-related Affective Well-being Scale (JAWS)

Paul E. Spector

University of South Florida

The Job-related Affective Well-being Scale, JAWS (Van Katwyk, Fox, Spector, & Kelloway, 2000) is a 30-item (full version) and 20-item (short version) scale designed to assess people's emotional reactions to their job. Each item is an emotion, and respondents are asked how often they have experienced each at work over the prior 30 days. Responses are made with a five-point scale with anchors Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Quite often, Extremely often or always. The JAWS includes a wide variety of emotional experiences, both negative and positive. The emotions can be placed into four categories (subscales) that fall along two dimension: pleasurableness and arousal (intensity). The scale can be scored in three ways. 1, An overall score of all items with the negative emotions reverse scored; 2, Separate scores of all 15 (full version) or 10 (short version) negative or positive items combined separately without reverse scoring; 3, Four scores matching the above four categories containing 5 items each (see tables below).

Reliability

Internal consistency reliability estimates (coefficient alpha) are available from three studies (Bruk-Lee & Spector, In press; Spector, Fox, Goh, & Bruursema, 2003; Van Katwyk et al., 2000) using the different versions with heterogeneous working samples. Internal consistencies for the total score and four subscales are in the table.

JAWS 30-item full version	n	Coefficient Alpha
Total JAWS (all 30 items)	114	.95
Negative emotion	235	.92
Positive emotion	114	.94

JAWS 20-item short version	n	Coefficient Alpha
Negative emotion	166	.88
Positive emotion	166	.90
High pleasurable-High arousal (HPHA)	114	.90
High pleasurable-Low arousal (HPLA)	114	.81
Low pleasurable-High arousal (LPHA)	114	.80
Low pleasurable-Low arousal (LPLA)	114	.80

U.S. Norms

JAWS full version	n	Mean	Standard deviation
Total JAWS (all 30 items)	114	105.6	16.7

JAWS short version	n	Mean	Standard deviation
Negative emotion	166	23.0	7.7
Positive emotion	166	30.2	9.3
High pleasurable-High arousal (HPHA)	114	14.4	3.9
High pleasurable-Low arousal (HPLA)	114	16.5	3.4
Low pleasurable-High arousal (LPHA)	114	9.5	3.2
Low pleasurable-Low arousal (LPLA)	114	11.0	3.5

n = sample size

References

Bruk-Lee, V., & Spector, P. E. (In press). The social stressors-counterproductive work behaviors link: Are conflicts with supervisors and coworkers the same? Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.

Spector, P. E., Fox, S., Goh, A. P. S., & Bruursema, K. (2003). Counterproductive work behavior and organizational citizenship behavior: Are they opposites? Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Orlando, April 11-13.

Van Katwyk, P. T., Fox, S., Spector, P. E., & Kelloway, E. K. (2000). Using the Job-related Affective Well-being Scale (JAWS) to investigate affective responses to work stressors. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5, 219-230.