Welcome to the Occupational Justice Health Questionnaire Resource Site!
Purpose of this Website
This website is intended to publicly share resources about the Occupational Justice Health Questionnaire and how it is used both in research and practice.
Background
The Occupational Justice Health Questionnaire (OJHQ) is a tool that was originally created by Prof. Ann Wilcock and Prof. Elizabeth Townsend (Wilcock & Townsend, 2014). The OJHQ was developed to aid occupational therapists in identifying injustices experienced by individuals, groups, and communities. Specifically, the OJHQ is a semi-structured way to identify determinants that characterize a person or group’s ability to engage in a variety of daily activities/occupations, ability to exercise basic human rights within a certain context, and inability to participate due to existing occupational injustices (Sy et al., 2021).
Research and Scholarship
Research on the OJHQ remains limited today. While originally published as an open tool in the Willard & Spackman's occupational therapy textbook (Wilcock & Townsend, 2014), it was only used a few years later for a single-subject case study (Sy & Ohshima, 2018) and a cross-sectional, phenomenological study (Sy et al., 2019) within the context of substance addiction and rehabilitation in the Philippines. Most recently, the OJHQ has then been used in another qualitative study that explored the occupational justice experiences of students during the coronavirus pandemic (Delos Reyes et al., 2021). While several researchers, educators, and students have contacted us about the OJHQ, these studies are yet to be published. We are hoping that more health, social welfare, and justice workers can consider this tool for their scholarship and practice.
On-going studies using OJHQ:
Sy, M. P., Martinez, P. G. V., & Tyminski, Q. (on going). Tools for OT practice: Integrating hidden occupations in assessment and intervention planning. Workshop to be presented in WFOT 2022 Paris.
Guevara, C. A. L., Sy, M. P. S., Roraldo, M. P. N. R, Apigo, R. (on going). Exploring lived experiences of Filipino persons who use drugs towards daily living after rehabilitation.
Tuibeo, K.K., Arago, Q., Bejasa, N., Buenafe, J., Caseres, M., and Delos Reyes, R.C. (ongoing research) An inquiry to the experiences of gay individuals during the pandemic using an occupational justice lens, College of Allied Medical Sciences, University of Batangas
OJHQ as a Tool
The original OJHQ is a five-part checklist with binary options (i.e., able and unable) across 27 items related to basic needs (Part I), overall wellbeing (Part II), living standards (Parts III & IV), and specific injustices decreasing occupational participation (Part V). When used for the studies abovementioned, the tool was adapted and translated into the Filipino language and culture. This led Sy and associates (2021) to engage in a critical and reflexive exercise where they examined how the tool can be refined and improved. With the goal of furthering the OJHQ as a tool, they proposed two things: 1) suggestions on how to improve OJHQ implementation and contextualization when used for research and practice, and 2) an appendix of definition of terms for the constructs included in the OJHQ.