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testing until its biochemical testing program was 
underway for necessary employee groups. Both types of testing will 
constitute its "safe workplace plan."
 
Meanwhile, the safe workplace coordinator described to me some problems 
he foresees with fitness-for-duty testing. Although he praised 
fitness-for-duty testing for obviating the "awkward" situation of having
to administer a drug or alcohol test for reasonable suspicion, he
complained that such testing required too many resources -- trainers and
coordinators, as well as computers.
 
He also explained that travel between the organization's primary site 
and its scores of widely dispersed testing sites, to conduct 
train-the-trainer sessions to expand the testing program, had all too 
frequently been pre-empted by inclement Arctic weather. I asked the safe
workplace coordinator if I could distribute my questionnaire to
employees who had been taking fitness-for-duty tests before the
program's abeyance.  He refused to give me access, replying that he
wanted to "monitor the program internally." 
 
Three organizational representatives who participated in the interview 
phases of the study immediately consented to distribute my
questionnaire. 
One neither responded to my letter nor returned my numerous phone calls.
I decided to reinitiate contact with the company president whom the test
manufacturer had advised against administering my questionnaire. I told
him I had removed the questions asking employees to compare
performance-based testing with urine drug testing (as such questions
were not pertinent to any of the other organizations) and asked him if
he would review the new version of the questionnaire. Not long after I
sent him a copy of the questionnaire, he agreed to distribute it if I
would remove Question 7 (because he felt employees would not be in a
position to judge whether fitness-for-duty testing is a sound
investment) and Question 12 (because he wanted to avoid the "legal"
issues he thought it raised). He was also worried that asking employees
their gender and age might be construed by them as discriminatory. I
explained to him that researchers typically gather demographic
information about their sample, but offered to add the following phrase:
"The purpose of Questions 1-5 is to gather some basic information about
the individual s responding to this survey. However, if there is any
question you would prefer not to answer, please leave it blank."
 
The data from this organization are not included in the analysis to 
follow, because employees had not yet received questionnaires when this 
manuscript was prepared.
 
Sample
 
Responses from 62 individuals are included in the data analysis. At 
one organization, 42 of 100 individuals returned the questionnaire; at 
another, nine of 35 (25.7%) did. These 51 individuals responded about 
Factor 1000. At the third organization, which uses Delta-WP, the 
representative informed me that nine (one whole unit) of the 35 
individuals who were sent the questionnaire had stopped taking the 
performance test before the questionnaires arrived, and one supervisor
had refused to distribute the questionnaires to her unit of six, for
fear of the impact on her job security of her subordinates'
participation in my research.
 
Further, my representative told me she had overheard some employees' 
complaining: "Why should we help anyone connected with this test?" (Of 
course, it would have behooved them to express their negative views to
an outsider.) Still, eleven of the 20 ( 55%) receiving the questionnaire
responded. In sum, the questionnaire had a 40% response rate across the
three organizations.
 
The mean age of the 19 females and 43 males in the sample was 36.95 
years (s.d. 11.57). All but three (95.16%) had at least a high school 
diploma or G.E.D. Forty-five (72.6%) had completed at least some
college, and 17 (27.4%) had earned a bachelor's degree. Data analysis.
The screen plot of a principal components factor analysis indicated that
one factor, accounting for 49.5% of the variance, comprised the items in
the questionnaire (Eigenvalue 7.92 and Kaiser's Measure of Sampling
Adequacy .84). All items loaded onto this factor except Question 6. The
mean loading for the other 15 items was .72. 
 
Responses to these 15 items were averaged to form a scale of employees' 
attitudes toward fitness-for-duty testing (coefficient .93). Values 
ranged from 1 to 4.533, with a median of 2.57 and a mean of 2.60 (s.d. 
.90). That is, employees generally had somewhat negative views toward 
fitness-for-duty testing. It is notable that three of the five highest 
(most positive) scores toward fitness-for-duty testing came from one 
company's human resources director and vice president of operations, as 
well as an employee there who commented that her own experience with 
fitness-for-duty testing was limited because she had worked for the 
organization for only five weeks and was therefore "not positive" that 
testing "indicates level of work ability." Attitudes toward 
fitness-for-duty testing were not significantly correlated with gender, 
age, education, or years in the organization.
 
Forty-nine (79.03%) of the respondents wrote comments in the space 
provided. Only one comment was purely positive: "It is not annoying or 
unfair to take a performance test because it is good to know if you are 
aware of what you are doing on the job" ( female, 33, about Delta-WP).
 
Nine comments were neutral or mixed. For example: "We have not had it 
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