The International Work Addiction Scale (IWAS): A screening tool for clinical and organizational applications validated in 85 cultures from six continents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background and aims: Despite the last decade's significant development in the scientific study of work addiction/workaholism, this area of research is still facing a fundamental challenge, namely the need for a valid and reliable measurement tool that shows cross-cultural invariance and, as such, allows for worldwide studies on this phenomenon. Methods: An initial 16-item questionnaire, developed within an addiction framework, was administered alongside job stress, job satisfaction, and self-esteem measures in a total sample of 31,352 employees from six continents and 85 cultures (63.5% females, mean age of 39.24 years). Results: Based on theoretical premises and psychometric testing, the International Work Addiction Scale (IWAS) was developed as a short measure representing essential features of work addiction. The seven-item version (IWAS-7), covering all seven components of work addiction, showed partial scalar invariance across 81 cultures, while the five-item version (IWAS-5) showed it across all 85 cultures. Higher levels of work addiction on both versions were associated with higher job stress, lower job satisfaction, and lower self-esteem across cultures. The optimal cut-offs for the IWAS-7 (24 points) and IWAS-5 (18 points) were established with an overall accuracy of 96% for both versions. Discussion and conclusions: The IWAS is a valid, reliable, and short screening scale that can be used in different cultures and languages, providing comparative and generalizable results. The scale can be used globally in clinical and organizational settings, with the IWAS-5 being recommended for most practical and clinical situations. This is the first study to provide data supporting the hypothesis that work addiction is a universal phenomenon worldwide.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".