The study describes an exploratory effort to develop procedures and techniques to assess work-relevant affect. A stimulus word list, consisting of 211 words in 10 work and one miscellaneous categories, was tested on 10 female secretaries and 10 male auto mechanics to determine from their single-word responses the hierarchical structure of work environment categories. Since the test did not produce a meaningful associative map of the work environment, the stimuli were converted from single words to 40 phrases in seven categories. The phrase stimuli were tested on 19 male auto mechanics, 19 female secretaries, and 19 computer data processors (14 males) with the aim of deriving stimulus meaning from their multiple word associative responses themselves by means of content analysis. The response distributions for each occupation are discussed in the text and tabularly displayed by stimulus phrases and each of 13 derived response categories. The test results indicate that people associate positive affect with the work environment, which the report considered as general support for a positively valenced work ethic. One-half of the document contains appendixes describing the word association instruments, and the response distributions pooled by stimulant and frequency for each of the two tests. (JR)