Design and development of a visual comfort questionnaire (VCQ) for employees in the workplace

Introduction: Visual comfort is an important and influential factor on safety, mental health, sleep quality, and musculoskeletal disorders of employees in the workplace. This study aimed to design and develop a questionnaire to assess the visual comfort of employees in the workplace. Methods: The study was performed on 101 participants (88 men and 13 women) in the food industry. First, the available lighting questionnaires in the field of lighting were reviewed, and a question bank was collected. Twenty questions were considered in two sections of natural and artificial lighting (10 questions in each section) based on the opinion of 10 experts in this field. The validity of the questionnaire was assessed using the content validity index (CVI) based on the comments of experts. To validate the questionnaire in the workplace, The lighting of employees' workstations was evaluated according to the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) standards and compared with the results of the questionnaire. Results: The Cronbach's alpha of natural and artificial lighting visual comfort questionnaire was 0.858 and 0.922, respectively. The total CVI of the questionnaire was 1. There was a significant positive relationship between the score of the visual comfort questionnaire and the workstations' illumination (P=0.001). More than 97% of employees who had workstations with the desired lighting reported excellent levels of visual comfort. Conclusion: The visual comfort questionnaire had good and acceptable reliability and validity. This tool is recommended to assess the visual comfort of employees in work environments due to the small number of questions and simplicity of sentences.