Methodology for psychosocial risk assessment among workers with intellectual disabilities
Méthode d’évaluation des risques psychosociaux auprès de Travailleurs Déficients Intellectuels
Résumé
Objectives. Since 2009, French institutions have been subject to a national agreement concerning occupational stress. A lot of scientific work is published each year on burnout and the suffering at work of the employees of the structures taking care of workers with intellectual disabilities. But psychosocial risks are rarely mentioned for intellectually disabled workers in sheltered work censers. Despite these recent obligations, there is a lack of tools available and adapted to the assessment of the psychosocial risks of this specific population, which are the workers with intellectual disabilities. The purpose of this study was to develop a tool to assess their potential exposure to psychosocial risks.Materials and methods. Two research questions guided the design process: how to collect explicit data on the perception of the operators recognized as being intellectually disabled to carry out a diagnosis of psychosocial risks? How to overcome the obstacle of their difficulties of comprehension of the language? We hypothesized that the verbalizations of workers with intellectual disabilities could be collected with an adapted questionnaire, and express reliably their feelings about their working conditions. To do this, we combined a language skills test with the perception of work situations tool to ensure that the instructions are correctly understood. Then, an ergonomic analysis was used to confirm the answers to the questionnaire. In a second phase of the study, the questionnaire was administered to a sample of workers with intellectual disabilities.Results. The answers to the questionnaire showed that certain areas of work constitute important resources for these workers: a good understanding of the meaning of the work, as well as the positive perception of the relational context in which they work. At the opposite, the organization of work, somatic perception, and especially the cognitive context deserve special attention. Finally, even if the harassment dimension is at a level that seems rather favorable, the few rare cases expressed invite us to analyse this dimension in greater depth. Our work shows the interest of the questionnaire used. Its use, however, needs to be associated with the language skill test. The diagnosis of psychosocial risks must also be included in an overall ergonomic approach. In this way, it is possible to ensure the adequacy of real work situations, especially when workers have language comprehension difficulties. The diagnostic process must also integrate the close collaboration of the supervising educational team for the implementation and monitoring of this evaluation.Conclusions. This study is a first step in the psychosocial risk assessment process for workers with intellectual disabilities. However, it has a number of limitations related to its exploratory nature. These limits will have to be exceeded during its extensions and developments. Thus, for example, when some workers show overall negative results in terms of their feelings on all areas of the questionnaire, an individual interview will be necessary. This investigation will characterize the criticality of the risk as a function of the frequency of exposure to potentially problematic situations and the severity of the damage or its consequences.
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