and has been
used extensively in the investigation of occupational stress
among nursing and medical personnel (Weyers et al. 2006;
Lamy et al. 2013). We used the version of the questionnaire
with 17 items, and for each participant, we quantified effort
(6 items) and reward (11 items). Perceived stress was then
scored as the ratio of effort to reward. As Siegrist recommended and has been done in earlier studies (Siegrist 1996;
Peter et al. 1998), we classified subjects as exposed to high
ERI if the ratio of the “effort” to “reward” scores, weighted
for the numbers of items, exceeded 1.0.