Diagnosis of the work context in municipal school-day care centers

Abstract

This is a report on a Psychology internship experience in the worker’s health field that aimed to diagnose aspects of working conditions, work organization and socio-professional relations of two municipal school-day care centers. A cross-sectional study was carried out using the Assessment Scale of Work Context (ASWC) with 39 workers, 19 from one day care center and 20 from the other. The average result obtained for the factors “Work Organization” and “Work Conditions” indicated a “Critical” result in both day care centers, signaling the existence of an alert situation that demands the implementation of immediate actions in the short and medium term for improvements to be achieved. The socio-professional relations factor obtained an average result considered satisfactory for school-day care center 1 and critical for school-day care center 2. The ASWC scale in both educational units showed internal consistency and no redundancy since the Cronbach’s Alpha obtained ranged from 0.78 to 0.82 in school-day care center 1 and from 0.69 to 0.81 in school-day care center 2. It was concluded that the context of both day care centers is not entirely favorable, and there is a need for interventions in order to avoid damage to the workers’ health.