Purpose The Work Role Functioning Questionnaire 2.0 (WRFQ) is a questionnaire that measures health-related work functioning. The aim of this study is to validate the WRFQ in working cancer patients.

Methods The WRFQ 2.0 measures perceived difficulties in meeting work demands with 27 items (on a five-point scale, range 0–100) and has four subscales. A cross-sectional study was conducted in cancer patients returning to work. The reliability (internal consistency), structural validity (confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)), and construct validity (hypotheses testing) of the WRFQ were evaluated. It was hthat cancer patients with lower self-rated health (SF-1, excellent-good vs poor-fair) and higher fatigue (CIS-8, tertiles) would have had higher WRFQ scores.

Results A total of N = 255 working cancer patients completed the survey (mean age 50.8, SD = 7.9 years) mainly diagnosed with breast cancer (44%), followed by colon cancer (13%). A CFA showed a fair fit for the WRFQ’s four factor structure with a Chi-Square=829.07 (P ≤ 0.001) and RMSEA = 0.084 (90% CI: 0.077–0.091). Cronbach’s alpha’s were between 0.82–0.93 for the subscales and 0.95 for the total scale. The WRFQ was able to distinguish between groups with high/low levels of self-rated health (79.1 vs 71.4, p < 0.001) and fatigue (71.0 vs 77.6 vs 83.4, p < 0.001).

Conclusions The WRFQ 2.0 is a reliable and valid instrument to measure health-related work functioning in cancer patients, and is able to differentiate between several groups, indicating its discriminative ability. Further research is needed to evaluate the ability of the WRFQ to predict the course of work functioning and to examine responsiveness.