Development of a Compact Measure of Job Satisfaction: The Abridged Job Descriptive Index

The Job Descriptive Index is a popular measure of job satisfaction with five subscales containing 72 items. A national sample ( n = 1,534) and a sample of university workers ( n = 636) supported development of an abridged version of the Job Descriptive Index (AJDI) containing a total of 25 items. A systematic scale-reduction technique was employed with the first sample to decide which items to retain in each scale. The abridged subscales were then tested in the second sample. Results indicated that the relationships among the five abridged subscales and between the five abridged subscales and other measures were substantially preserved.