Abstract

RUIZ PEREZ, José Ignacio; BRINGAS MOLLEDA, Carolina; RODRIGUEZ DIAZ, Francisco Javier  and  GARCIA CUETO, Eduardo. Transcultural validation of an emotional climate scale for prison environments. rev.latinoam.psicol. [online]. 2014, vol.46, n.2, pp.92-101. ISSN 0120-0534.

Assuming that the perception of emotional climate results in the social interaction of the individual with environmental events, this study is based on the need for a tool to assess the climate in a stressful environment like prisons. The objective is to adapt an emotional climate scale, whilst establishing the factors that shape it and their relationship to the level of burn-out in prison workers in their work, and seeking to determine the degree of stability at a transcultural level. The participants were 728 prison workers in Colombia (N = 506, 369 men and 137 women) and in Spain (N = 222, 164 males and 58 females), with ages ranging from 18 to 60 years, and were mainly prison guards. The tools used were the CEP- Organizational Emotional Climate in Prisons (Ruiz, 2007a, 2007b) and the Burnout Inventory-MBI by Maslach and Jackson (1981). Using confirmatory factor analysis, the results show a two-factor structure: a positive and negative climate, offering good consistency, both for subscales and global scale, as evaluated in both prison climates, although with significant differences at the transcultural level. The stress variable exhibit differential convergence with respect to each of the contexts evaluated, and identify differential contextual variables. The results are discussed at the level of involvement for a better understanding of the bifactorial structure of emotional climate and its implications for future research and intervention level.

Keywords : Emotional Climate; Burnout; Prison Environment; Psychometry.

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