Psychosocial Work Environment (COPSOQ III)COPSOQ III
~9 min · 60 questions · Free partial report
This test contains sensitive content. Results are private and not shared with employers unless you explicitly consent.
Sixty questions about the working conditions you are actually exposed to — how much lands on you and how fast, how much say you have, whether you know what is expected, who backs you up, what you can trust, and what all of it does to the rest of your life. The Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire is the international reference instrument for psychosocial risk at work, maintained by a research network and cited by the WHO and the ILO. It does not score you; it maps 26 dimensions of the environment around you, one 0-100 reading at a time.
Not your personality — your working conditions. Sixty questions, twenty-six dimensions of the environment around your job. Answering is free; the full analysis is the service.
- Map your perceived exposure across 26 dimensions of the psychosocial work environment — demands, influence, support, meaning, insecurity, trust, justice — and see which parts of your working conditions load you, which sustain you, and where work spills into the rest of your life.
No signup required to start. The Partial Report is free at the end. The Complete costs $14.90, if and when you want it.
What this test measures
Quantitative Demands
Work Pace
Emotional Demands
Demands for Hiding Emotions
Influence at Work
Possibilities for Development
Control over Working Time
Meaning of Work
Predictability
Recognition
Role Clarity
Role Conflicts
Illegitimate Tasks
Quality of Leadership
Social Support from Supervisor
Social Support from Colleagues
Sense of Community at Work
Job Insecurity
Insecurity over Working Conditions
Quality of Work
Job Satisfaction
Work Life Conflict
Horizontal Trust
Vertical Trust
Organizational Justice
Self-rated Health
Discover where you stand on each dimension.
Start for free →No prior signup. Free partial result immediately.
From first click to report.
The process is simple: you respond, the system calculates, and the result appears. No prior signup, no form, no waiting.
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Click "Start for free"
No signup required to start. You identify yourself at the end, when you want to save the result. The test opens immediately.
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Answer the questions
Likert 5-point scale (anchors vary by question: frequency, extent, satisfaction, and one self-rated health item). Visible progress bar. You can pause and resume from any device after identifying yourself.
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Get the Partial Report
Immediate and free. A text summary of each dimension, with indication of high, medium, or low.
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Decide if you want the Complete
The Partial already delivers value. The Complete adds percentiles, norm comparison, charts, applied recommendations, and a verifiable Certificate.
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Explore in the Integrative Chat
Talk to an AI about your results. Ask how your profile applies to your career, what a high score means, or compare with other tests.
The Partial is yours right away. The Complete, when it makes sense.
| Free and paid, side by side | Partial Report (free, always) | Complete Report ($14.90) |
|---|---|---|
| Interpretive text per dimension, generated from your answers | ✓ | ✓ |
| Raw score for each dimension | ✓ | ✓ |
| One-paragraph overview reading | ✓ | ✓ |
| Everything in the Partial, expanded to 3–5 paragraphs per dimension | — | ✓ |
| Percentile per dimension, compared to reference norms | — | ✓ |
| Inter-dimensional chart with accessible data table | — | ✓ |
| Applied recommendations: career, relationships, self-care | — | ✓ |
| Certificate with public verification and PDF download | — | ✓ |
- ✓Everything in the Partial, expanded to 3–5 paragraphs per dimension
- ✓Percentile per dimension, compared to reference norms
- ✓Applied recommendations: career, relationships, self-care
- ✓Certificate with public verification and PDF download
You only pay after completing the test, if you want to go beyond the Partial.
- ✓Interpretive text per dimension, generated from your answers
- ✓Raw score for each dimension
- ✓One-paragraph overview reading
- ✓Free trial of the Integrative Chat, unlocked by your first test
Payment via PIX (instant) or credit card. Access for 1 year. After that, the report stays visible in read-only mode.
What you receive.
Radar chart with percentiles. Illustrative example.
Executive Summary
"You present a profile marked by high intellectual curiosity and above-average conscientiousness, with moderate extraversion and balanced emotional reactivity. This combination suggests someone who seeks novelty in a disciplined way."
Illustrative example.
Scale analysis
The Complete Report details the practical meaning of each score in 3 to 5 paragraphs, personalized by your combined profile. It is not a generic text by range; the analysis crosses all dimensions to generate specific observations about you.
Applied recommendations
Practical recommendations by area (career, relationships, studies, self-care), based on your combined profile. Certificate with verifiable QR and PDF download.
Why trust this instrument.
The Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire III (Burr et al., 2019) is the international reference instrument for psychosocial risk at work. This is its middle international version: 60 items covering 26 dimensions — demands, influence and development, interpersonal relations and leadership, work-individual interface, trust and justice. Each dimension is scored as the mean of its items on the instrument's own 0-100 metric; there is deliberately no total score, because the result is an exposure profile, not a grade. The English and Spanish questionnaires are official versions reproduced verbatim (the licence forbids self-made translations). The licence also forbids charging for the questionnaire per se — answering is free, and what is paid for is the service around it: the analysis and the full report.
- Authors:
- Burr, Berthelsen, Moncada, et al.
- Year:
- 2019
- Burr, H., Berthelsen, H., Moncada, S., et al. (2019). The Third Version of the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire. Safety and Health at Work, 10(4), 482-503.
The theory behind this test.
Psychosocial Work Factors
Framework holding that measurable characteristics of how work is organized — demands, control, support, rewards, predictability, justice, insecurity — shape workers' health, motivation, and performance. It integrates the major work environment theories rather than following one: demand-control-support (Karasek & Theorell), effort-reward imbalance (Siegrist), job demands-resources, work-family conflict, and workplace social capital. Exposure is a property of the work environment, measured as workers' perceptions of current conditions, dimension by dimension, not a trait of the person.
Learn more about this theory →Target Audience
Anyone in paid work who wants a structured reading of their working conditions — employees, supervisors, and the people responsible for psychosocial risk assessment who want to experience the instrument from the inside.
Recommended ages: 18+
Questions the report answers.
Does the work fit in the time you are given?
This dimension reads the mismatch between what lands on your desk and the hours available — tasks piling up, work left behind, time that never suffices. High means more exposure to overload, not a stronger work ethic; chronically high scores here are one of the classic precursors of exhaustion. Low means the volume of work and the time to do it are roughly at peace.
How fast does the work make you move?
Distinct from volume: pace is the speed the work demands moment to moment — working very fast, at high intensity, all day. High means more exposure to sustained speed, which can be energizing in bursts and corrosive as a permanent state. Low means the rhythm leaves room to think between actions.
How much feeling does your work put you through?
Some jobs process materials; others process people in difficult moments. This reads how often work places you in emotionally disturbing situations or hands you other people's problems. High is an exposure reading, typical of care, teaching, and service work — it names a real load, not a weakness in the person carrying it.
How much of what you feel must stay off your face?
The quiet second job of many roles: staying kind regardless of how you are treated, hiding feelings, keeping opinions unsaid. High means the work demands a lot of this self-containment — a load that is invisible on any task list but well documented as draining. Low means you can mostly be at work who you are.
How much say do you have over your own work?
Influence is the classic buffer in work psychology: the same demands weigh differently on people who can shape decisions, workload, and how the work is done. High means real leverage over your daily work. Low, especially combined with high demands, is the textbook high-strain configuration — worth noticing early.
Is the work building anything in you?
This reads whether the job lets you learn new things and use the skills you actually have. High means the work grows you as it uses you. Low describes work that neither stretches nor draws on you — a strong predictor of the slow, undramatic kind of disengagement that looks like nothing until the resignation letter.
Who owns your minutes — you or the schedule?
Small freedoms, measured precisely: deciding when to take a break, a holiday roughly when you want it, half an hour for private business without ceremony. High means the timetable has slack that belongs to you. Low means time is administered for you — a detail that quietly shapes how sustainable a demanding job is.
Does the work feel worth doing?
Two direct questions: is your work meaningful, and does it feel important. High meaning is one of the strongest sustaining forces a job can have — it makes demands bearable that would otherwise not be. Low meaning does the opposite: even light work grows heavy when it seems to matter to no one.
Do you find out in time, or find out the hard way?
Predictability is information arriving when you need it: advance notice of decisions and changes, and everything required to do the work well. High means the organization keeps you oriented. Low means navigating by rumor — and uncertainty about one's own near future is a stressor even when the news, once it arrives, is good.
Does the management actually see your work?
A single, pointed question: is your work recognized and appreciated by management. High means effort visibly registers somewhere above you. Low is one of the most reliable sources of workplace resentment — not because people need applause, but because sustained invisible effort reads, eventually, as effort wasted.
Do you know exactly what your job is?
Clear objectives, known responsibilities, explicit expectations. High clarity lets you spend energy on the work instead of on decoding it. Low clarity means part of every week goes to guessing what counts — and being evaluated against expectations nobody stated is its own quiet stressor.
Does the job contradict itself?
Contradictory demands, and tasks you believe should be done differently. High means more exposure to work that argues with itself — pleasing one requirement by violating another. That friction is a property of how the role is designed, though it is usually the person holding the role who feels defective.
How much of your work seems pointless?
Tasks that seem unnecessary — the operational reading of what stress research calls illegitimate tasks, work that offends one's sense of professional self. High means a meaningful share of effort feels wasted by design. This dimension is measured by a single question, so read it as a signal to examine, not a verdict.
Is your immediate superior good at the job of leading?
Concretely: planning work, solving conflicts, developing people. High describes leadership as a working capability, not charisma. Low quality of leadership radiates through several other dimensions — predictability, recognition, justice — which is why this reading so often names the mechanism behind a generally bad climate.
When you need your superior, do they show up?
Help and a willing ear from your immediate superior, when needed — the operative words. High support means problems escalate to solutions instead of accumulating. Low means you are effectively on your own with difficulties your role does not equip you to absorb alone.
Do your colleagues catch you when it gets heavy?
The same two readings, aimed sideways: help and listening from the people who work next to you. High collegial support is one of the strongest protective factors in demanding work. Low support turns every individual difficulty into a private one — the same load, carried without hands.
Is there a 'we' where you work?
Atmosphere between colleagues, and the feeling of being part of a community. High means the social fabric of the workplace holds — a resource that costs the organization nothing and buffers nearly everything. Low reads as coexistence without belonging: people sharing a room and not much else.
How present is the fear of losing this job?
Worry about becoming unemployed, and about how hard finding another job would be. High means more exposure to that background dread — a documented stressor that does damage well before, and whether or not, any job is actually lost. Low means the ground under you feels firm enough to ignore.
Is the job safe but its shape unstable?
A subtler insecurity: worry about being transferred, having your schedule changed, or your pay cut — against your will. High means the conditions of your work feel revisable over your head even if the job itself is safe. It is the dimension of people who will keep their position and still lose what made it livable.
Are you satisfied with the quality of what gets done?
Satisfaction with the quality of the work performed at your workplace. Low here often marks moral injury of a mundane kind: conditions that force work below one's own standard, which professionals experience as a personal cost. Single-question dimension — treat it as a pointer, not a measurement of craft.
Taking it all together — how pleased are you?
Satisfaction with your prospects, your pay, and the job as a whole. This is the summary feeling the other 25 dimensions feed: high usually means the profile's load-bearing conditions are working for you. A low reading with otherwise decent dimensions is interesting in reverse — something this questionnaire names elsewhere is likely weighing more than it appears.
What does the job cost the rest of your life?
Whether work drains so much energy, and takes so much time, that your private life pays for it. High is a spillover reading: the job's true cost measured where it actually lands — evenings, relationships, recovery. This dimension is often the first place a sustainable-looking job reveals that it is not.
Do the people who work together trust each other?
Whether employees in general trust one another. High horizontal trust makes information move and cooperation cheap; low trust taxes every interaction with self-protection. One question carries this dimension, so treat a surprising score as a prompt to look closer rather than a settled fact.
Does trust flow between floor and management?
Both directions at once: does management trust employees to do their work well, can employees trust what management says, and can they speak their views and feelings upward. High vertical trust is the quiet infrastructure of every honest workplace conversation. Low means communication has become performance in both directions.
Are conflicts and workloads handled fairly?
Fair conflict resolution and fair distribution of work. Perceived injustice is among the most corrosive workplace exposures on record — people absorb heavy demands with surprising grace when the system feels fair, and modest ones poorly when it does not. High here means the fairness machinery visibly works.
How is your health, in general?
One deliberately broad question, answered from excellent to poor — a measure with a long epidemiological record as a predictor of real health outcomes. In this profile it serves as context: the same environmental exposures land differently on different bodies. It reads your health, not what caused it.
Who benefits most.
A worker trying to locate what exactly is wearing them down
'Work is a lot lately' is not a finding. Twenty-six dimensions split the fog into named parts — load, pace, influence, support, justice — and show which two or three are actually carrying the weight.
An HR or safety professional who will run this on others
Before commissioning a psychosocial risk assessment, answer the instrument yourself. Knowing what the questions feel like from the inside — and what a dimension profile looks like — changes how you read the aggregate later.
A manager who suspects the problem is the design of the work
When good people keep burning out in the same role, the role is a suspect. The demands, influence, and predictability dimensions describe the job as its holder experiences it — which is not always the job the org chart describes.
Frequently asked questions
Is this test free? What exactly am I paying for?
Answering is free — as it is for every test on this platform — and the licence guarantees it stays that way: the COPSOQ International Network's conditions state, verbatim, that 'no fee can be charged for the use of the questionnaire per se'. What may be charged, by those same conditions, are the services around it — analysis, consulting, benchmarking — and that is exactly what the paid part is here: the full report, with all 26 dimensions read and interpreted. You pay for the analysis of your answers, never for the right to answer.
Why is the questionnaire only available in English and Spanish?
Because the licence forbids us from translating it ourselves. Only official national versions may be used, verbatim — and the map of complete official versions is uneven: Italian has no COPSOQ III at all; the German and Portuguese versions have structural gaps in exactly the item set this test uses; and Brazil's validated instrument is the COPSOQ II-Br, a different questionnaire of the same family that we are preparing separately. English (the international source version) and Spanish (COPSOQ-Istas21 v3) are the two complete official versions — so those are the two you get, unaltered.
What does one person's result mean, if this measures a workplace?
Psychosocial exposure is defined as shared perception, so your answers are one honest reading of the room — real, but singular. On its own, your profile tells you which conditions you are working under and which ones deserve your attention. Its diagnostic power grows with company: when several colleagues answer independently and the same dimensions light up, that pattern is no longer an anecdote — it is the beginning of a risk assessment.
Is this a diagnosis of me or of my workplace?
Neither. It is a profile of perceived exposure: a structured description of the working conditions as you experience them, dimension by dimension. It does not diagnose you — only one of the 60 questions is about your health at all — and one person's answers do not diagnose an organization. What it does is name things precisely: 'role conflicts high, predictability low' is a far more usable finding than 'work feels bad lately'.
I scored 'Very High' on demands. Is that a bad result?
It is an honest result. Every dimension here reads in the same direction — a high score means more of what the dimension names, never better or worse as a verdict. Very high quantitative demands means heavy load; very high meaning of work means strong purpose. The band labels are NOESIS quartile markers on the instrument's 0-100 metric, not official reference values — the COPSOQ tradition compares scores against national population data, which we do not currently apply.
Will my employer see my answers?
No. This is your personal result, taken on your own account, and the COPSOQ network's own guidelines require anonymity in any workplace application ('all respondents and their responses must be kept anonymous'). When organizations use NOESIS to assess psychosocial risk, they see aggregated readings, never an individual's answers — that boundary is structural on this platform, not a courtesy.
Combine instruments for a fuller profile.
Each test measures different dimensions. The Integrative Chat crosses the results of all tests you complete, revealing connections no single instrument can show.
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Start for free →Psychosocial Work Environment (COPSOQ III)
No signup, no time limit. The Partial is free at the end.
The Complete costs $14.90, if and when you want it.
This test is a self-knowledge tool for informational purposes. It does not constitute a psychological or clinical diagnosis and does not replace evaluation by a qualified professional. The report indicates the AI model used in text generation.
The COPSOQ III is maintained by the COPSOQ International Network and is free to use under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 with the network's own conditions: no fee may be charged for the use of the questionnaire per se (answering it here costs nothing — what NOESIS charges for is the analysis and full-report service around it, which the licence allows); items and response options must be reproduced verbatim from official validated versions, without modification; and translations exist only as official national versions — the English and Spanish offered here are reproduced verbatim from the network's international questionnaire and from COPSOQ-Istas21 v3.