Hello Tom and Alec,

Yes, you are right, and you highlight a very important point. The explanation of why that part of the survey, which deals with the interference of work and private life is done in such a way, is simply a matter of rigor. In order to carry out scientific research it is necessary to use questionnaires that have previously been scientifically validated and have undergone a rigorous process of permanent construction and evaluation, in order to have high levels of validity and reliability. At this point, this scale is one of the most widely used scales for measuring interference between work and private life (Work Interaction Home Nijmegen (SWING) Geurts et al., 2005).

The scales used are not my own, because in order to do that, I should have made a first test block inside the WordPress community to validate them and, believe me, very few people would have accepted to do several tests and accept to participate in the study at the end. For example, one of the tweets about the study had an impact of 5,455 people who saw it, but to date I do not have the number of participants needed to start working on the results (minimum 200-250 people) A little discouraging isn't it?

On the other hand, what I intend to measure is the personal work-life interaction and its impact on burnout, regardless of whether it is remote work or not (although initially my idea was to work on remote work). Obviously I agree with you that it would have been much more accurate to ask the questions bearing in mind that the majority of the WordPress community works remotely, but it is again the same problem of modifying and having to re-validate the questionnaire for the reliability of a scale. Reliability refers to the stability of the measurement over time.

For these reasons I decided to use questionnaires that had already been validated under the theoretical framework that I am using. Although not the most accurate for now, the idea is to open the door to research (there are already several researchers interested in the subject).

I hope I have been able to help. Unfortunately it is impossible for me to change the questions at this point, since it has been very difficult to get people to participate in the study, but I really hope that this small first step will start to improve mental health and well-being in these fields of open source and remote work.

Thank you so much for your participation and your opinions! It is really helpful! <3