The Spanish version of the Work-related Acceptance and Action Questionnaire (WAAQ)

Background: Psychological flexibility, a key construct of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), has recently been found to be an important determinant of mental health and behavioral effectiveness in the workplace. This finding has led to designing a measure of psychological flexibility especially tailored to the workplace (the Work-related Acceptance and Action Questionnaire; WAAQ) in the hope that it may reveal even stronger associations with variables related to a work context. Method: First, we back-translated the WAAQ into Spanish and then administered it to 209 workers, in addition to other relevant work-related measures. Results: Data were very similar to those obtained with the original WAAQ version. The WAAQ showed a very good internal consistency (alpha = .92) and a clear one-factor structure. It also showed higher correlations with work-specific measures than a general measure of psychological inflexibility (the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II; AAQ-II). As hypothesized by the ACT theory, the correlation between the WAAQ and the AAQ-II was moderate but not so high as to suggest that they are assessing the same construct. Conclusions: This Spanish translation of the WAAQ emerges as a reliable and valid measure of psychological flexibility in relation to the workplace.