The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work
Sabine Sonnentag · Charlotte Fritz
Journal of Occupational Health Psychology · 2007
What the research tells us
The Recovery Experience Questionnaire distinguishes psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery and control during nonwork time, yielding 16 items in four factors. It provides a way to discuss and measure different experiences; questionnaire scores do not themselves measure physiological recovery.
Scope & interpretation
Validation relied mainly on self-report and correlations. Factors overlap, particularly relaxation and control. Cross-language invariance, additional recovery experiences and incremental prediction of objective recovery trajectories require separate tests.
Study at a glance
- POPULATION & SAMPLE
- 991 returned questionnaires were randomly split; after missing-data exclusions, calibration and cross-validation each included 465 people, totalling 930. A construct-association subsample included 271.
- EXPOSURE / INTERVENTION / SUBJECT
- Item development and exploratory/confirmatory factor analyses of four experiences and related constructs.
- OUTCOMES
- Calibration CFI=.97 and RMSEA=.069; cross-validation CFI=.96 and RMSEA=.082. Fit and construct associations should be considered together.
- TIME FRAME
- Scale development and concurrent construct validation, without common physiological follow-up.
Cited on this site
Recovery
Recovery Is Not Rest
Why Can Stress Responses Continue After Work Ends?
Editorial & review record
Record for v0.3 · Updated
Editorial responsibility: TAP Editorial Team
Editorial note
Under the editorial responsibility of the TAP Editorial Team, this publication used AI assistance for content organization and editing.
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How responsibilities and review are recorded ↗Scope of this reading note
Institution-hosted original full text: item generation, sample splitting, CFA, construct associations and limitations. Cross-language and all subsequent validation studies are outside this note's scope.
- Funding & competing interests
- Funding and competing-interest details have not been verified against the full text. Consult the original publication’s declarations.
Project support
Founded and supported by Resilio.
Revision history
- · v0.3
Clarified the 465+465 analysis samples, factor structure and self-report validation limits.