In many studies, a standardized symptoms checklist is used to measure work-related musculoskeletal disorders. Most questionnaires include measures of prevalence, severity and frequency, but little is known about how to combine these measures. One approach for combining various measures of prevalence, frequency and severity is Latent Class Analysis (LCA) that allows for the assessment of the structure of the relationships among the various aspects of reported symptoms. In this paper we explore the use of Latent Class Analysis to analyze the relation between job characteristics and musculoskeletal disorders in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) data 1992–2004.
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