Browsing by Subject "demands of the work"

Objectives of the study: Multidiscipline knowledge is needed in evaluation of person's functional capacity in work: physical and psychosocial factors must be considered. Generic models and tools are needed to provide common practices to evaluate work-ability (or demands of the work) and to understand the relevance of multifaceted factors underneath. Reflective processing of one's own knowledge and intuitions is seen to improve a person's ability to understand the relevance of unfamiliar information and to achieve a higher cognitive congruence in a multi-professional group. That can be achieved through group-learning practices. In a current research effect of IMBA- methods training is studied. It is assumed that training will increase the cognitive congruence between professionals evaluating work-ability. Methods: Three training groups were arranged in 2005. 51 professionals of vocational rehabilitation participated (43 women and 8 men). They evaluated both the functional capacities of a person and the demands of work before and after their IMBA-training. Evaluations were done on the basis of written case-information. The data of these evaluation tasks is data of this study. Both independent samples and repeated measures settings was used. The effect of training is analyzed as a measure of absolute agreement indexes (ICC and rrg) Results and conclusions: The results agreed with the hypothesis: After IMBA training the level of absolute agreement was higher in evaluating both the demands of work and the functional capacities of a person. Differences between training groups, features of the task or familiarity of the material didn't seem to influence the effect. Agreement got higher in evaluating physical and psychosocial factors of workability. The effect was very systematic. The evaluations were more congruent after training even though the effect was not strong enough to reach statistical significance with these samples. What was surprising was that demands of work were systematically evaluated lower after training as the functional capacities of persons were evaluated the same or a little higher after the training. Interesting question is: Do the professionals overestimate the demands of the work in general when making evaluations based on their intuitive thinking? If that's the case, the customers of vocational rehabilitation are seen as more disabled compared to demands the work than they are in real. The possibility of a systematic error like this in evaluating workability must be studied more in the future.