A Comparison of Safety, Health, and Well-Being Risk Factors Across Five Occupational Samples

Abstract

Objective: The aim of this study was to present safety, health and well-being profiles of workers within five occupations: call center work (N = 139), corrections (N = 85), construction (N = 348), homecare (N = 149), and parks and recreation (N = 178).Methods: Baseline data from the Data Repository of Oregon's Healthy Workforce Center were used. Measures were compared with clinical healthcare guidelines and national norms.Results: The prevalence of health and safety risks for adults was as follows: overweight (83.2%), high blood pressure (16.4%), injury causing lost work (9.9%), and reported pain (47.0%). Young workers were least likely to report adequate sleep (46.6%). Construction workers reported the highest rate of smoking (20.7%). All of the adult workers reported significantly lower general health than the general population.Conclusion: The number of workers experiencing poor safety, health and well-being outcomes suggest the need for improved working conditions.

Family-Supportive Supervisor Behaviors and Psychological Distress: A Secondary Analysis across Four Occupational Populations

“…In alignment with prior research [28], this study utilized a novel common measures methodological approach to investigate a repository of cross-sectional data from several large-scale studies for the purpose of examining the relationship between employee reports of FSSB and their reports of psychological distress among workers in various occupations. The goal of this study is to understand the relationship between supervisor support (i.e., FSSB) and psychological distress across diverse organizational contexts.…”

“…As emphasized by Hanson and colleagues [28], the common measures methodology presents several empirical advantages given that it employs the same set of standardized measures both across and within populations. Additionally, population-based studies tend to be more expensive, may be limited to broader occupational categories, and have been lacking in their generalizability to U.S. populations given the majority have been conducted in Europe [28].…”

“…As emphasized by Hanson and colleagues [28], the common measures methodology presents several empirical advantages given that it employs the same set of standardized measures both across and within populations. Additionally, population-based studies tend to be more expensive, may be limited to broader occupational categories, and have been lacking in their generalizability to U.S. populations given the majority have been conducted in Europe [28]. Therefore, the implementation of a common measures approach in the current study, enables a robust evaluation of the relationship between employee reports of FSSB and their psychological distress, specifically, examining data from four U.S. worker populations.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, two prior studies utilized the common measures approach [28,32]. However, this is the first study to conduct a cross-sectional comparison utilizing baseline data to specifically examine the relationship between employee perceptions of FSSB and their psychological distress across four occupational samples.…”

Do overweight/obesity and low levels of leisure-time vigorous physical activity moderate the effect of occupational physical activity on self-rated health of construction workers?

“…Also, blue-collar workers may believe that they already meet the recommended level of physical activity while at work and thus lack motivation to also engage in LTPA (Brownson et al 2001 ; Rasmussen et al 2018 ). In addition, linked to leisure-time physical inactivity, blue-collar workers including the specific group of construction workers, have higher rates of overweight or obesity compared to white-collar occupational groups (Alavinia et al 2009 ; Boal et al 2020 ; Hanson et al 2021 ; Harris et al 2011 ; Myers et al 2021 ; Willett et al 2013 ).…”