Negative Working Conditions and Health Across the Career

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of the proposed research is to examine how workers in the United States encounter multiple negative experiences at work, and how the accumulation of these experiences over the career is associated with their health trajectories. Paid employment is a central feature of most adults' lives, providing economic sustenance as well as a source of esteem and identity, but negative working conditions including job strain (high demands combined with low control), job insecurity and unemployment, and low job satisfaction have been linked to poor health. However, the clustering of these multiple exposures at a given point in the career has not been extensively explored, though every employment situation potentially exposes a worker to a range of such psychosocial stressors. Moreover, despite growing scientific interest in cumulative disadvantage across the life course, the extent and nature of exposure to an array of negative working conditions over the career is even less well understood than the extent to which they cluster at any given time point. A better understanding of negative exposures at work is relevant to population health because it may help to explain why the health trajectories of initially socially-disadvantaged workers continue to diverge from those of their more-advantaged counterparts. Using nationally-representative samples of U.S. workers from the longitudinal Americans' Changing Lives (ACL) and Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) studies, we will explore the following specific aims: (1) explore the extent to which individuals experience the clustering of multiple negative working conditions in their jobs, and identify characteristics that put individuals at greatest risk, (2) examine how workers move through careers, accumulating exposure to negative working conditions, and (3) assess whether and how life course exposure to negative working conditions is related to trajectories of self-rated health and depressive symptoms. Item Response Theory (IRT) models will be used to generate continuous measures capturing joint exposure to job strain, job insecurity, and low job satisfaction at a given survey wave, and linear individual growth models of these exposure measures will be estimated and linked to linear individual growth models of health. Workplace policy or interventions potentially could be more successful if they recognized the total psychosocial burdens workers face, and the groups of workers who are most vulnerable. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project is consistent with the continuing mission of the Demographic and Behavioral Science Branch (DBSB) of NICHD with respect to research on the intersection of health and demographic processes, specifically labor force participation. This project has important implications for public health. It will provide new information about the clustering of psychosocial workplace hazards at one point in time and over the career, and about their association with trajectories of self-rated health and depressive symptoms. The proposed research will also examine the importance of these negative working conditions for explaining or increasing health disparities over the life course in the United States.