0173 Grouping strategies for exposure assessment of the psychosocial work environment

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

OBJECTIVES: Individual response style, mood, expectations, and health status may affect reporting of the psychosocial work environment, and bias associations with outcomes. Reporting bias may be avoided by aggregating individual responses, ideally preserving exposure contrast. In this study, we examined the degree of exposure contrast yielded by different grouping strategies.

METHOD: In 2007, we enrolled 4489 public employees from Aarhus, Denmark in the PRISME-cohort, with follow-up in 2009. From pay-roll registers we grouped workers at 2 organisational levels: department (n = 22) and work unit (n = 751), and 3 occupational levels: sector (n = 7), profession (n = 46), and job title (n = 77). Exposures, calculated as means of items scored on 5-point Likert scales, included psychological demands, decision latitude, social support, effort, reward, and procedural and relational justice. To assess variance components, we fitted linear mixed effect models with exposures as dependent variables, and id and grouping variables as random effects. Results are reported as the contrast in mean exposure levels e.g. between-group variance/ (between-group variance +within-group variance).

RESULTS: Within each hierarchy contrasts rose with increasing group-level detail. Grouping by either work unit (wu) or by job title (jt) contrasts were: psychological demands: 0.28(wu); 0.26(jt), decision latitude: 0.24(wu); 0.32(jt), social support: 0.24(wu); 0.06(jt), effort: 0.23(wu); 0.16(jt), reward: 0.19(wu); 0.12(jt), procedural justice: 0.24(wu); 0.14(jt), and relational justice: 0.29(wu); 0.04(jt).

CONCLUSIONS: Grouping by work unit gave the most consistent contrasts (0.19-0.29), while grouping by job title varied considerably (0.04-0.32). These preliminary findings suggest that grouping by work unit provided better exposure contrasts than grouping by job title for all exposures, but decision latitude.

Original languageEnglish
JournalOccupational and Environmental Medicine
Volume71 Suppl 1
Pages (from-to)1-2
Number of pages2
ISSN1351-0711
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2014

ID: 128643339