Measuring Digital Work in (German) Employee Surveys: An Overview and Proposal of Systematization

Innovative measurements in representative surveys are needed to draw meaningful conclusions about the prevalence of digital work and its consequences for employees' job demands and resources. Since the digitalization of work encompasses a variety of technological developments and possible implications for employment, there are many different approaches to its operationalization. Within this article, we (1) provide a scheme for classifying different approaches to measuring digital work, (2) apply this scheme to nine different representative German employee surveys that operationalize digital work, and (3) evaluate the measurement of digital work by discussing the advantages and limitations of the different approaches. We identify three approaches to measuring digital work: equipment-based, content-based, and opinion-based. Besides the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches, we discuss the state of the art in measuring digital work and whether it would make sense to create a standardized set of questions.