Development and Validation of Three Workplace Aggression Experience Scales for Israeli Social Workers

Background and Purpose: Workplace aggression in social service settings poses significant threats to employee well-being, organizational functioning, and service quality. While research has predominantly examined perpetrators and victims as separate phenomena, the role of witnesses — employees who observe but are not directly involved — remains largely unmeasured. This gap is compounded by the absence of validated Hebrew-language instruments capturing all three perspectives simultaneously. This study developed and validated three parallel Hebrew-language scales measuring workplace aggression — perpetration, victimization, and witnessing — among Israeli social workers, and established the first empirical normative data for this population.

Methods: Items were adapted from the Client Violence Questionnaire (Enosh et al., 2014) and Martinko's organizational aggression measures, translated into Hebrew, and modified to reflect peer-level aggression. Each scale comprises 21 items rated on a 9-point frequency scale. Two samples from municipal social service departments across Israel participated: Wave 1 (N = 470; 93.4% female; M age = 45.2) and Wave 2 (N = 203; 94.1% female), collected six months apart. Analyses included internal consistency, KMO and Bartlett's test, exploratory factor analysis with Promax rotation, inter-scale correlations, convergent validity, criterion-related validity, and cross-wave factor structure comparison.

Results: All three scales demonstrated excellent internal consistency (α = .90–.96), exceeding the psychometric properties of the original instruments. KMO values confirmed adequate sampling (.856–.928). Factor analysis revealed a dominant first factor explaining 44–49% of variance. A clear ordinal pattern emerged: witnessing scores were highest (M = 1.02, SD = 1.10), followed by victimization (M = 0.42, SD = 0.71) and perpetration (M = 0.21, SD = 0.44), consistent with social desirability effects. Inter-scale correlations were moderate to strong (r = .487–.749), supporting conceptual relatedness while maintaining discriminant validity. All scales demonstrated expected convergent correlations with hostile climate, emotional exhaustion, stress symptoms, and service climate. Criterion-related validity was supported through significant associations between witnessing and organizational outcomes (emotional exhaustion: β = .276, p < .001; stress symptoms: β = .186, p = .001; service climate: β = −.227, p < .001). Cross-wave analysis revealed that witnessing and victimization scales maintained consistent factor structures, while the aggression scale showed greater variability attributable to floor effects.

Conclusions and Implications: These validated Hebrew-language scales provide reliable instruments for comprehensively assessing workplace aggression in social service settings. The witnessing and victimization scales demonstrated superior temporal stability, making them suitable for pre-post intervention measurement and longitudinal research. The perpetration scale is best suited for cross-sectional climate assessment. Normative data from a national Israeli sample provide benchmarks for future research and have direct implications for developing evidence-based interventions protecting social workers and the populations they serve.