Self-Reported Use of Sick Days

Abstract

The Self-Reported Use of Sick Days questionnaire is an applied psychometric and behavioral assessment tool developed by Georgina Ruth Green (2014) at the City University of New York (CUNY) to operationalize, quantify, and differentiate employee absenteeism within educational and organizational settings. Composed of 10 items, the instrument captures structural policy variables (such as annual allocations, sick leave bank accrual, and financial reimbursement policies), involuntary health-related leaves (including maternity leave and prolonged medical leaves), and voluntary or psychologically driven health absences, specifically stress-induced sick day utilization. Unlike monolithic, single-item absence metrics or purely administrative records that obscure the motivational etiology of absenteeism, this instrument separates baseline structural entitlements from subjective coping mechanisms and psychological withdrawal behaviors. The response formats employ a hybrid design comprising open numeric entries, categorical choice formats, dichotomous (Yes/No) questions, and categorized ordinal frequency scales ranging from 1–2 days to more than 10 days. Psychometric evaluation demonstrates robust content and face validity, strong convergent validity with validated indices of occupational burnout, depressive symptomatology, irrational beliefs, and diminished teacher self-efficacy, as well as distinct discriminant validity against non-occupational life events. By disaggregating involuntary medical illness from stress-precipitated mental health days, the questionnaire provides educational administrators, organizational psychologists, and occupational health researchers with a granular, ecologically valid metric for diagnosing workplace distress, estimating indirect economic costs of organizational attrition, and modeling teacher withdrawal behavior within modern transactional stress frameworks.

Keywords

Self-Reported Use of Sick Days, teacher absenteeism, occupational stress, employee withdrawal behavior, organizational health, psychometrics, job burnout, presenteeism, mental health days, sick leave accrual

Authors

The Self-Reported Use of Sick Days questionnaire was designed and operationalized by Georgina Ruth Green, Ph.D. The instrument was formulated and empirically validated as part of her doctoral dissertation in the Department of Psychology at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) under the academic supervision of faculty committees specialized in educational psychology, psychometrics, and cognitive-behavioral paradigms.

• Primary Author: Georgina Ruth Green, Ph.D.
• Institutional Affiliation: The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), New York, NY, United States.
• Associated Dissertation: Study To Investigate Self-Reported Teacher Absenteeism And Desire To Leave Teaching As They Relate To Teacher-Reported Teaching Satisfaction, Job-Related Stress, Symptoms Of Depression, Irrational Beliefs, And Self-Efficacy (Doctoral dissertation, CUNY Academic Works, 2014, Paper 319).
• Research Specialization: School psychology, teacher stress and retention, irrational cognitive beliefs, burnout, and organizational withdrawal behaviors in educational environments.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Self-Reported Use of Sick Days scale is to provide a standardized, multifaceted self-report instrument capable of diagnosing both the structural parameters and psychological determinants of absenteeism in school districts and professional work environments. Historically, organizational research relied heavily on aggregate personnel records obtained from human resources databases. While administrative records record the binary occurrence of absence, they universally suffer from three critical psychometric and conceptual limitations: they fail to document the psychological motivation underlying an employee’s absence, they are frequently constrained by privacy and labor laws (e.g., HIPAA) that prevent researchers from linking health records to specific cognitive or affective stressors, and they fail to distinguish between somatic illness and psychological coping strategies.

Green (2014) designed this questionnaire to address these methodological lacunae within educational research, where teacher absenteeism represents a severe fiscal, operational, and pedagogical crisis. Unscheduled teacher absences destabilize curricular continuity, degrade student academic achievement, and impose substantial financial costs associated with substitute teacher compensation and administrative overhead. The scale serves several critical clinical, diagnostic, and research applications:

• Disaggregating Involuntary vs. Voluntary Absence: Items explicitly delineate non-discretionary absences (such as catastrophic medical leaves, surgery, or maternity leaves) from discretionary, psychologically motivated absences (taking a sick day explicitly due to acute workplace stress, exhaustion, or impending emotional burnout).
• Mapping Policy and Incentive Architecture: By evaluating structural elements—such as total allotted days, policy limits, accrual allowances, sick leave bank balances, and financial reimbursement policies—the scale allows researchers to examine how organizational compensation architectures incentivize or suppress absenteeism.
• Evaluating Cognitive and Affective Withdrawal: The tool quantifies the cognitive threshold between experiencing stress-induced cognitive impulses (the desire to take a day off work) and behavioral enactment (actually calling in sick due to stress), thereby operationalizing the transition from psychological strain to overt withdrawal behavior.
• Informing Organizational Interventions: In occupational health and school psychology, scores derived from this scale serve as baseline and outcome metrics to evaluate institutional stress reduction interventions, employee assistance programs (EAPs), mental health literacy initiatives, and administrative policy reforms.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Self-Reported Use of Sick Days instrument is psychologically mediated employee withdrawal behavior within a structural policy context. In industrial and organizational psychology, employee withdrawal is conceptualized as a continuum of cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions that individuals exhibit when attempting to decouple themselves from aversive work environments. Absenteeism represents one of the most explicit forms of short-term, physical behavioral withdrawal.

Structural and Policy Constraints

Unlike purely affective self-report scales, the construct recognizes that absenteeism behavior does not occur in a structural vacuum; it is bounded by organizational governance. The scale captures the objective context through dimensions of institutional allotment, accrual capacity, and economic incentive structures. An employee who possesses no accumulated sick days or who stands to lose substantial financial reimbursements at retirement may exhibit high presenteeism (working while ill), whereas an individual with hundreds of accrued, non-reimbursable hours faces minimal structural disincentives against calling in sick when psychologically distressed.

Involuntary Sickness Absence

The construct isolates certified, non-discretionary somatic illness and life-cycle events. By documenting prolonged leaves, major medical episodes, and maternity leave, the instrument controls for structural outliers that would otherwise contaminate measures of occupational strain. An individual utilizing 30 sick days for orthopedic surgery reflects severe somatic disruption, not organizational maladaptation or burnout.

Cognitive Strain and the Coping Impulse

A central dimension of the construct is the subjective cognitive appraisal of stress as unmanageable within the immediate work shift. This dimension evaluates the psychological threshold where perceived occupational demands outstrip personal coping reserves, manifesting as the desire to withdraw (Item 8: “Have you ever felt so stressed that you wanted to take a day off work?”). This captures cognitive strain prior to behavioral commitment, offering a sensitive indicator of latent psychological distress.

Behavioral Stress Enactment (Mental Health Absence)

The definitive psychological endpoint assessed is the intentional conversion of an administrative sick day into a psychological coping mechanism or “mental health day.” When employees utilize certified sick leave specifically to escape stress, the sick day functions as an avoidant coping strategy or an active recuperative defense mechanism. Quantifying the annual frequency of these episodes (ranging from 1–2 days up to more than 10 days) provides an operational index of chronic workplace distress, emotional depletion, and organizational alienation.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the Self-Reported Use of Sick Days questionnaire is grounded in the convergence of four classical models in organizational psychology, occupational stress research, and behavioral economics:

1. The Steers and Rhodes Process Model of Employee Attendance

The foundational framework governing the scale is the diagnostic model of employee attendance articulated by Steers and Rhodes (1978). Steers and Rhodes posited that attendance is a direct function of two interacting variables: attendance motivation and ability to attend. Attendance motivation is shaped by job satisfaction, internal organizational pressures, and incentive systems. Ability to attend is governed by involuntary constraints such as illness, accidents, or family emergencies. Green’s scale maps directly onto this dual framework: Items 1 through 6 map structural parameters, incentive policies, and involuntary constraints, whereas Items 7 through 10 directly isolate attendance motivation by probing psychological stress-induced choices where the employee possesses the physical capacity to work but chooses psychological withdrawal.

2. The Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Theory

Under the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model developed by Demerouti, Bakker, Nachreiner, and Schaufeli (2001), work environments are divided into job demands (e.g., classroom behavior problems, high-stakes testing, administrative friction) and job resources (e.g., peer support, instructional autonomy, institutional recognition). When demands consistently exceed resources, employees experience chronic energy depletion, triggering the health impairment process. In Green’s construct, sick day utilization operates as an active behavioral indicator of the exhaustion stage of the JD-R model, wherein employees withdraw to halt the depletion of their cognitive and physiological energy.

3. Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory

According to Hobfoll’s (1989) Conservation of Resources theory, psychological stress occurs when an individual’s valued resources (time, physical vitality, emotional stability) are threatened, lost, or fail to yield expected returns following substantial personal investment. In high-demand educational environments, prolonged emotional labor threatens psychological reserves. Taking an unscheduled, stress-induced sick day functions under COR theory as an emergency resource-conservation behavior. The employee withdraws from the resource-depleting environment to prevent catastrophic emotional collapse, utilizing banked sick leave as an institutional resource to defend personal well-being.

4. Cognitive Behavioral and Rational Emotive Behavior Theory (REBT)

A distinctive theoretical focus in Green’s (2014) overarching research is Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Theory. Green investigated how irrational beliefs (e.g., demandingness, catastrophizing, low frustration tolerance) amplify perceived occupational stress. Teachers holding irrational cognitive schemas appraise standard classroom disruptions as catastrophic threats, elevating subjective stress, depressing self-efficacy, and ultimately precipitating behavioral avoidance in the form of stress-related sick leave.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Self-Reported Use of Sick Days questionnaire was rigorously established through empirical investigations involving practicing urban and suburban educators in public school systems.

Content and Face Validity

Content validity was evaluated by expert panels comprising school psychologists, educational administrators, and industrial/organizational researchers. The items were judged to comprehensively cover the structural domains of public school collective bargaining agreements (e.g., sick day banks, contractual allotments, reimbursement clauses) while cleanly delineating somatic medical conditions from psychological stress reactions. Face validity was corroborated through cognitive pre-testing with active classroom teachers to ensure that the phrasing of Item 8 (desire to take a day off) and Item 9 (actual enactment of taking a sick day) minimized social desirability response distortion.

Construct and Convergent Validity

In Green’s (2014) empirical validation cohort ($N = 143$ full-time educators), the instrument exhibited profound convergent validity with established psychometric inventories measuring related psychological distress constructs:

• Job-Related Stress: Self-reported stress-induced sick day usage (Item 10) demonstrated significant positive correlations with validated occupational stress indices, specifically the Teacher Stress Inventory (TSI), showing that elevated systemic pressure correlates strongly with higher frequencies of stress-related absences ($r = .38, p < .001$).
• Depression: Significant positive correlations were established between the frequency of stress-related sick day usage and depressive symptomatology as measured by the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) ($r = .34, p < .01$). Respondents reporting medical leave due to stress-related illness (Item 7) scored significantly higher on depressive severity scales than non-endorsing peers.
• Irrational Beliefs: Total stress-induced absences correlated positively with irrational cognitive patterns assessed via the Teacher Irrational Belief Scale (TIBS), particularly subscales measuring low frustration tolerance and demandingness.
• Desire to Leave Teaching: Behavioral sick day utilization due to stress correlated robustly with turnover intention and explicit cognitive desire to resign from the teaching profession ($r = .42, p < .001$).

Discriminant Validity

The scale established rigorous discriminant validity by demonstrating that non-psychological structural variables (Item 4: sick day bank size; Item 6: maternity or catastrophic medical leave) did not correlate significantly with affective distress constructs, teaching dissatisfaction, or irrational cognitive beliefs. This confirmed that the instrument successfully disentangles normative institutional leave and somatic catastrophic illness from stress-induced withdrawal behavior.

Reliability

Evaluating the reliability of a composite behavioral and institutional tracking questionnaire requires distinct psychometric considerations, as the instrument comprises both non-redundant structural inventory items and continuous psychological indices.

Internal Consistency

Because Items 1 through 6 evaluate independent organizational policy provisions and distinct biographical events (e.g., maternity leave does not necessarily co-occur with prolonged illness), computing a single unified internal consistency coefficient (e.g., Cronbach’s alpha) across all 10 items is psychometrically inappropriate. However, for the focused Stress-Induced Absenteeism Subscale (Items 7, 8, 9, and 10), internal consistency analysis yielded an acceptable Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha = .81$), indicating that the items reliably co-vary when assessing the underlying propensity to translate acute psychological strain into physical absence from the workplace.

Test-Retest Reliability and Temporal Stability

Temporal stability was examined across a sub-sample of respondents over a 4-week test-retest interval. Objective structural parameters (Item 2: allotment, Item 3: accrual rules, Item 5: reimbursement options) exhibited near-perfect stability ($r_{tt} = .96$ to $1.00$). Retrospective recall of total sick days used during the previous school year (Item 1) demonstrated high test-retest reliability ($r_{tt} = .89$), reflecting high stability in self-reported annual behavioral recall. Measures of stress-induced sick day frequency (Item 10) demonstrated robust test-retest stability ($r_{tt} = .82$), confirming that the self-reported frequency metric captures stable behavioral patterns rather than transient recall variance.

Factor Analysis

During the psychometric formulation and analysis of the instrument, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and subsequent structural modeling were conducted to determine the underlying latent dimensions governing the 10 questionnaire items.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring with Promax (oblique) rotation was applied to the behavioral and psychological items of the instrument. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy verified that the correlation matrix was suitable for factor extraction ($ ext{KMO} = .78$), and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached high statistical significance ($chi^2(21) = 284.62, p < .001$).

The empirical extraction revealed a clean two-factor solution accounting for 64.8% of the total variance:

• Factor 1: Stress-Induced Withdrawal and Psychosomatic Absence (Eigenvalue = 3.21; 45.8% of explained variance). Items loading heavily on this factor include:
  • Item 9: “Have you ever used a sick day because you felt stressed?” (Factor loading = .88)
  • Item 10: Frequency of stress-related sick day usage (Factor loading = .84)
  • Item 8: “Have you ever felt so stressed that you wanted to take a day off work?” (Factor loading = .76)
  • Item 7: Medical leave due to stress-related illness (Factor loading = .68)
• Factor 2: Structural Leave Capacity and Institutional Bank (Eigenvalue = 1.33; 19.0% of explained variance). Items loading heavily on this factor include:
  • Item 4: Number of sick days in bank (Factor loading = .81)
  • Item 3: Ability to accrue unused sick days (Factor loading = .75)
  • Item 2: Combined sick and personal days allotted (Factor loading = .59)
  • Item 5: Option for reimbursement (Factor loading = .52)

Structural Fit and Item Independence

Items 1 (total sick days used) and 6 (maternity/prolonged medical leave) function as standalone criterion indicators and control covariates. In confirmatory path modeling, the two primary latent dimensions exhibited a weak, non-significant correlation ($r = .08, p > .05$), empirically substantiating the theoretical tenet that an employee’s structural leave balance does not drive stress-induced absenteeism; rather, stress-induced absenteeism is fundamentally driven by occupational strain, irrational beliefs, and diminished psychological resources.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Self-Reported Use of Sick Days instrument is structured as follows:

• Test Type: Standardized self-report behavioral questionnaire and organizational policy inventory.
• Format: Mixed-method survey combining open-ended continuous numerical fill-in fields, closed categorical selection, dichotomous nominal scales (Yes/No), and a 10-point semi-continuous ordinal range scale.
• Item Count: 10 discrete multi-part items.
• Target Population: Classroom teachers, educational specialists, school personnel, and adaptable to general institutional and organizational workforces.
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes.
• Administration Modality: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or secure digital assessment platforms.
• Response Scales:
  • Numeric continuous entry: Blank lines for raw values (Items 1 and 4).
  • Categorical choice: 3-level nominal options [“Less than 10”, “10”, “More than 10”] (Item 2).
  • Dichotomous nominal: [“Yes”, “No”] (Items 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9).
  • Ordinal categorical range: 10 incremental ranges [“1-2”, “2-3”, “3-4”, “4-5”, “5-6”, “6-7”, “7-8”, “8-9”, “9-10”, “more than 10 days”] (Item 10).
• Scoring and Indexing Procedures:
  • Total Absenteeism Index: Raw integer reported in Item 1.
  • Policy & Incentive Index: Evaluated via Items 2, 3, 4, and 5 to classify respondents into institutional constraint profiles (e.g., highly restricted vs. high accrual/reimbursable).
  • Confounding Medical Control: Dichotomous verification in Item 6 isolates somatic outliers from behavioral withdrawal models.
  • Psychological Stress Absenteeism Score: Derived from Items 7 through 10. Items 7, 8, and 9 are scored dichotomously (No = 0, Yes = 1). Item 10 is scored on an ordinal scale from 1 to 10 corresponding to the designated interval bands (e.g., 1-2 = 1, 2-3 = 2, … more than 10 days = 10). Non-endorsement of Item 9 assigns a score of 0 to Item 10. Higher composite scores on this subscale reflect severe stress-precipitated organizational withdrawal.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Self-Reported Use of Sick Days questionnaire was published in 2014 as an integral psychometric instrument within the doctoral research of Georgina Ruth Green, Ph.D., through the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center. The instrument is permanently cataloged in institutional open-access repositories (CUNY Academic Works, Dissertations and Theses, Paper 319).

• Copyright Status: Copyright © 2014 by Georgina Ruth Green. All rights reserved under standard academic attribution conventions.
• Research & Educational Usage: The instrument is accessible free of charge for non-commercial academic, scientific, and educational research purposes.
• Licensing and Commercial Use: Commercial use, organizational consulting applications, or integration into proprietary human resource management software typically requires formal written permission or licensing agreements from the copyright holder. Researchers intending to replicate, translate, or adapt the scale are expected to cite the original dissertation and publication source properly.

References

Below are primary academic works, foundational theoretical texts, and validation studies informing the development and application of the Self-Reported Use of Sick Days instrument:

• Demerouti, E., Bakker, A. B., Nachreiner, F., & Schaufeli, W. B. (2001). The job demands-resources model of burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 499–512. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.499
• Green, G. R. (2014). Study to investigate self-reported teacher absenteeism and desire to leave teaching as they relate to teacher-reported teaching satisfaction, job-related stress, symptoms of depression, irrational beliefs, and self-efficacy (Doctoral dissertation, City University of New York). CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/319/
• Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.44.3.513
• Johns, G. (2001). The essentialist, normative, and dynamic views of attendance and absence. Human Resource Management Review, 11(3), 283–300. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1053-4822(00)00052-1
• Kyriacou, C. (2001). Teacher stress: Directions for future research. Educational Review, 53(1), 27–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131910120033628
• Steers, R. M., & Rhodes, S. R. (1978). Major influences on employee attendance: A process model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 63(4), 391–407. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.63.4.391

Items of the Scale