PreWorkS : A Precarious Work Scale for the Cultural and Creative Industries

The current study proposes and validates the Precarious Work Scale (PreWorkS), a modular, theory-based instrument intended to encapsulate the multidimensional and idiosyncratic nature of precarious work within the cultural and creative industries (CCIs). PreWorkS was constructed through a systematic multi-step process, yielding 11 items across four dimensions: job instability, economic precarity, limited collective bargaining power, and lack of rights and protection. The scale was evaluated with a sample of 469 workers in CCIs, who were categorised into five professional categories. Confirmatory factor analysis corroborated the multidimensional structure, while the MIMIC-DIF analysis provided support for the scale's overall comparability across the five groups. Latent mean differences revealed significant structural inequalities within CCIs. Furthermore, the findings provide substantiated evidence for the construct validity of the instrument. Overall, PreWorkS emerges as a psychometrically robust instrument that is capable of capturing precarious working conditions in CCIs, whilst also highlighting the uneven distribution of precariousness.