Occupational health psychology

Occupational health psychology OHP is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health together with safety of workers. OHP addresses the number of major topic areas including the affect of occupational stressors on physical together with mental health, the affect of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, work-family balance, workplace violence and other forms of mistreatment, psychosocial workplace factors that affect accident risk and safety, and interventions intentional to enhance and/or protect worker health. Although OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational psychology, for a long time the psychology establishment, including leaders of industrial/organizational psychology, rarely dealt with occupational stress and employee health, devloping a need for the emergence of OHP. OHP has also been informed by other disciplines, including occupational medicine, sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as living as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is thus concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that exposure to long workings hours causes an estimated 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke in 2016, mediated by occupational stress.

Research methods

The main aims of OHP research is to understand how works conditions affect worker health, usage that cognition to grouping interventions to protect and reclassification worker health, and evaluate the effectiveness of such(a) interventions. The research methods used in OHP are similar to those used in other branches of psychology.

Self-report survey methodology is the most used approach in OHP research. Cross-sectional designs are commonly used; case-control designs make been employed much less frequently. Longitudinal designs including prospective cohort studies and experience sampling studies can discussing relationships over time. OHP-related research devoted to evaluating health-promoting workplace interventions has relied on quasi-experimental designs, less commonly experimental approaches, and rarely natural experiments.

Statistical methods commonly used in other areas of psychology are also used in OHP-related research. Statistical methods used include structural equation modeling and hierarchical linear modeling HLM; also so-called as multilevel modeling. HLM can better redesign for similarities between employees and is particularly living suited to evaluating the lagged impact of realize stressors on health outcomes; in this research context HLM can assistance minimize censoring and is well-suited to experience-sampling studies. Meta-analyses have been used to aggregate data innovative approaches to meta-analyses rely on HLM, and draw conclusions across combine studies. OHP researchers studying the structural validity of their nearly commonly used assessment instruments employ exploratory structural equation modeling bifactor analyses.

Qualitative research methods used on OHP research increase interviews, focus groups, and self-reported, statement descriptions of stressful incidents at work. First-hand observation of workers on the job has also been used, as has participant observation.