Work , Stress, Health and Parenting Among Hotel Employees

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application outlines plans for a developmental center that would conduct collaborative pilot research on work stress, health, and parenting for hotel employees as part of a research network focused on developing intervention protocols to study the health benefits of workplace policies and practices (RFA-HD-04-017). The proposed research involves three products, each of which involves collaborative research with a hotel company partner. The first product is an individual research project that uses daily diary methods to examine associations of daily work stressors with daily self reports and physiological measures (i.e., cortisol) of physical health, well-being, and productivity, within and across days. Specifically, we would add the collection and assaying of cortisol to an ongoing, Sloan Foundation-funded daily diary study of hotel managers and their spouses/partners (n = 120 couples), and we would develop a new daily diary investigation of the connections between work stressors and the same outcomes for hotel hourly workers (n = 120). The project would contribute to the network a sophisticated method by which it can examine, in subsequent large-scale intervention research, the day-to-day processes that occur when employees have access to new policies and practices and their implications for the health, well-being, and productivity of employees and their family members. We also propose to lead a collaborative project to identify appropriate measures of parenting for the network, via consultation with each network partner, reviewing the relevant literatures, and conducting focus groups at partners' work sites (including our own hotel company sites). The third product is a collaborative project to develop and pilot test a stress management intervention targeted at first-line supervisors (in our case, in hotels), and creates a survey tool that taps organizational readiness for interventions. Together, the activities of the network address an important public health issue: the implications of ongoing stressors in the workplace for the health and well-being of employed adults and their families. Pilot research of this kind is needed to plan large-scale interventions that would evaluate the extent to which "family-friendly policies and practices" at work make a measurable and significant difference in the lives of employees and their families. The results of such large-scale interventions will inform policy makers and employers and perhaps stimulate workplaces to provide more support for working families.