Job Satisfaction Index

Name: Job Satisfaction Index
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Author: Mohammed looti

Mohammed looti

Job Satisfaction Index

By Mohammed looti / October 28, 2025

Table of Contents

Abstract

The Job Satisfaction Index (JSI), developed by Brayfield and Rothe in 1951, is a concise psychometric instrument designed to provide a global measure of an individual’s affective attitude toward their current employment. The scale was intentionally constructed to meet several rigorous criteria, including universal applicability across diverse occupational fields, sensitivity to variations in employee attitudes, and administrative brevity. The JSI comprises 18 items, utilizing a methodology rooted in the Thurstone scale approach, and has demonstrated strong psychometric properties, particularly high internal reliability and convergent validity with other established measures of job satisfaction.

Keywords

Job Satisfaction Index (JSI), job satisfaction, organizational psychology, psychometrics, attitude measurement, employee well-being, industrial/organizational psychology, Thurstone scaling.

Authors

Arthur H. Brayfield, Harold F. Rothe

Purpose

The primary purpose of the JSI is to quantify the overall level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction an employee experiences regarding their specific job role. The scale was developed as a practical yet statistically sound alternative to more complex, facet-based measures, focusing instead on capturing a single, general index score that reflects the affective orientation of the employee toward the job itself.

The original development of the JSI was guided by five core criteria essential for effective organizational assessment tools. These included the requirement for the index to be applicable to various jobs, highly sensitive to subtle variations in employee attitudes, conducive to high cooperation rates from management and employees, statistically sound concerning reliability and validity, and sufficiently brief to facilitate large-scale administration.

Construct

The JSI measures the psychological construct of Global Job Satisfaction. This construct represents the holistic emotional and evaluative feeling an individual holds about their work environment and role. It is designed to capture the generalized affective response—the overall sense of liking or disliking one’s job—rather than specific elements contributing to that feeling (such as pay, coworkers, or supervision).

The instrument’s structure is based on the Thurstone scale methodology, a technique where items are assigned scale values based on preliminary judge ratings of how favorable or unfavorable the statement is regarding the measured attitude. The final 18 items included in the JSI possess established Thurstone scale values ranging from 1.2 to 10.0, ensuring that the scale accurately maps the full continuum of positive and negative job attitudes.

Validity

The JSI has demonstrated strong evidence of validity, supporting its utility in organizational research and practice. Its convergent validity has been established through positive correlations with other widely recognized and validated measures of job satisfaction.

Specifically, JSI scores correlate favorably with results from the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) and the Job Descriptive Index (JDI), indicating that it successfully measures the intended construct. Furthermore, the JSI has proven valuable in predictive research, where it has been utilized to examine relationships between overall job satisfaction and critical organizational outcomes, including employee turnover, productivity, and general well-being.

Reliability

The JSI exhibits high levels of internal consistency, confirming its status as a reliable psychometric tool. During its initial development, the instrument yielded an odd-even product moment reliability coefficient of .77. To account for the scale’s length, this coefficient was subsequently corrected using the statistical adjustment provided by the Spearman-Brown formula, resulting in a corrected coefficient of .87.

This high reliability figure confirms that the 18 items within the JSI consistently measure the same underlying construct of global job satisfaction. The consistency ensures that the instrument provides dependable measurements suitable for comparative analysis and tracking employee attitudes in research and applied settings.

Factor Analysis

The Job Satisfaction Index was explicitly designed to be a unidimensional measure, providing a single score representing overall affective job attitude. Consequently, formal factor analyses typically support a single-factor structure, reflecting its conceptualization as a global index rather than a multifaceted scale.

While this unidimensionality is an advantage in terms of administration and scoring brevity, it also represents a limitation. The JSI effectively measures the magnitude of satisfaction but does not differentiate between the specific components (e.g., pay, working conditions, or colleagues) that contribute to that feeling. Researchers seeking to analyze specific job facets often require supplemental instruments.

Instrument

Test Type: Self-report questionnaire / Global Attitudinal Index

Format: 18 items rated on a 5-point agreement-disagreement scale (Likert-type response format, derived from Thurstone scaling methodology).

Language Available: Primarily English (original development).

Population Group: Employees/Workers across various industries and occupations.

Age Group: Adult working population.

Population Details: The JSI is highly versatile due to its applicability across a wide variety of organizational roles and industries, making it suitable for large-scale organizational surveys and academic research studies.

Test Methodology: The scale was developed through a multi-step process involving judge ratings to determine item scale values, preliminary administration, and subsequent revisions. The final version consists of 18 statements with established Thurstone scale values.

Keywords

Organizational behavior, psychometric scale, employee attitudes, industrial psychology, Brayfield and Rothe, global satisfaction, work assessment.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not available (Original publication predates ORCID system).

Affiliation Email addresses: Not available (Original publication predates standardized email communication).

Correspondence Address: Not available (Original publication predates standardized correspondence tracking).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Year: 1951

Permissions and Fee: Developed in 1951, the JSI is a historical and foundational instrument in organizational psychology. Researchers often utilize this scale for non-commercial academic research without specific fees, though permissions should always be sought or confirmed via the original publisher, the American Psychological Association (APA).

Reference’s

Brayfield, Arthur H., & Rothe, Harold F. (1951). An index of job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 35(5), 307-311. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0055617

Items of the Job Satisfaction Index

IMPORTANT: The following scale items must be preserved in their original language and must not be changed in any way.

Some jobs are more interesting and satisfying than others. We want to know how people feel about different jobs. This blank contains eighteen statements about jobs. You are to cross out the phrase below each statement which best describes how you feel about your present job. There are no right or wrong answers.

We should like your honest opinion on each one of the statements. Work out the sample item numbered (0).

There are some conditions concerning my job that could be improved. (Sample Item 0)