ABSTRACT
There are numerous methods of analyzing jobs for ergonomic risk factors or ergonomic stressors (Keyserling et al., 1991; Ulin et al., 1992). Many companies, consultants, and others have devised job analysis methods. Most of these are proprietary or protected under copyright and as such are not available to everyone. There are some that are available in book form (Burke, 1992). These seem to be regimented and somewhat simplistic. Job analyses generally take one of three forms — checklist, interactive formbased, and narrative or open-ended methods. The checklist method is the simplest to conduct, but it has some very real drawbacks. Some will believe it can be used in place of training and experience, but in the hands of inadequately trained people, checklists can be and have been grossly misused. They do not typically allow for flexibility and may not ask the appropriate questions for a particular job unless they are extremely thorough and therefore long. The interactive form-based method takes considerable time and money to develop and to verify its efficacy. These sometimes have the same drawbacks that checklists have. Namely, they may not allow for flexibility and may not ask the appropriate questions for a particular job unless they are extremely thorough and therefore long. The narrative method is thorough, straightforward, relatively easy to learn, versatile, easy to use, and is generally accepted. On top of all this, it is an intuitively pleasing method.
