Objectives: In modern professional life, mental health prevention and promotion have become a major challenge for decision-makers. Devising appropriate actions requires better understanding the role played by each work-related psychosocial factor (WPSF). The objective of this study was to present a relevant tool to hierarchise WPSFs that jointly takes into account their importance (impact on mental health) and their prevalence (the proportion of the population exposed to WPSF).
Design: A cross-sectional study was conducted in March 2018 among 3200 French workers which are representative of the French working population.
Setting: France.
Participants: Individuals aged 18-80 years who declared currently having a job (even a part-time job) whatever their occupation or status (employee or self-employed) were eligible. We excluded students, unemployed individuals, housewives/husbands and retired people. The mental health level was assessed using the General Health Questionnaire-28 and 44 items were gathered from theoretical models of WPSFs. We assessed two distinct multivariate methods for calculating WPSF importance: (1) weifila (weighted first last) method in a linear regression context and (2) random forests in a non-linear context. Both methods were adjusted on individual, health and job characteristics.
Results: The WPSF rankings obtained with the two methods to calculate importance are strongly consistent with each other (correlation coefficient=0.88). We highlighted nine WPSFs that are ranked high by both methods. In particular, irrespective of the chosen method, lack of communication, lack of social and hierarchy support and personal-professional life imbalance, emotional demands at work and dissatisfaction with the compensation received came out as top-ranking WPSFs.
Conclusions: A total of nine WPSFs were identified as key for decision-making. The easy-to-use tools we propose can help decision-makers identify priority WPSFs and design effective strategies to promote mental health in the workplace.
Keywords: epidemiology; mental health; public health; statistics & research methods.
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.