Validity of the Multiple Resources Questionnaire (MRQ)

The Multiple Resources Questionnaire (MRQ) is an easily administered 17-item measure for subjective workload assessment that aims to provide high diagnosticity by identifying the load on specific resources. Here validity data from two experiments are reported. Experiment 1 employs two computer-based games and finds that workload as assessed by the MRQ correlates significantly with ratings of overall workload, and with a composite of time demand, mental demand, and stress demand ratings. Because these are important dimensions of other well-accepted workload instruments (i.e., OW, NASA-TLX, and SWAT), the results support the construct validity of the MRQ. Experiment 2 assesses interference between pairings of four laboratory-based tasks, and finds that MRQ-based similarity indices significantly predict the degree of interference between tasks. This outcome supports the criterion validity of the MRQ.