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A self-administered questionnaire was completed by 211 workers in a business office who used video display terminals (VDTs) to do their work and by 148 control subjects who did the same job using paper documents instead of VDTs. The groups exhibited few differences in the likelihood and intensity of on-the-job physical discomfort, and no differences in the perception of discomfort that lingered after work. Almost identical proportions of subjects in the two groups reported that their vision had grown worse recently. Differences were found in job satisfaction and concerns about job security, but most of these favored VDT users. The use of an intermediate standard of comparison showed that the visual quality of VDT displays was preferred to that of the paper documents they replaced. The results confirm and extend the findings of the author's earlier study of telephone operators and show that VDTs need not be unusually potent sources of discomfort and disaffection among office workers.

Telephone operators served as their own controls in two field studies of advanced furniture designed for video display terminal (VDT) workstations. The advanced furniture was characterized by dimensions that were easily adjusted by users, in contrast with conventional furniture that provided either no adjustments or inconvenient adjustments that could only be made with difficulty. An eight-week study focused on advanced VDT tables, and a fiveweek study focused on advanced chairs. Four combinations of advanced and conventional workstation components were compared. Although on-the-job discomfort was reduced when either conventional component was replaced with an advanced component, the effect was far greater when the advanced table and the advanced chair were used together. The adjustments of the advanced furniture were reported to be easy to use, and the advanced furniture was rated more highly than the conventional furniture.

A self-administered questionnaire was completed by 145 Directory Assistance operators who used video display terminals (VDTs) to retrieve listings and by 105 control subjects who performed identical work except that they retrieved listings from printed paper records. The two groups exhibited few differences in their experience of work-related physical discomfort, in job satisfaction, or in their concerns about job security. Both groups were found to use eyeglasses and contact lenses to the same extent. VDT operators generally did not obtain special corrective lenses for work. The results show that replacing paper documents with VDTs need not adversely affect the comfort and morale of office workers.