Does recall bias explain the association of mood disorders with workplace harassment?

Igor Burstyn; Jean-Michel Galarneau; Nicola Cherry

doi:10.1016/j.gloepi.2024.100144

Does recall bias explain the association of mood disorders with workplace harassment?

Glob Epidemiol. 2024 Apr 28:7:100144. doi: 10.1016/j.gloepi.2024.100144. eCollection 2024 Jun.

Authors

Igor Burstyn¹, Jean-Michel Galarneau^{2

3}, Nicola Cherry²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
² Division of Preventive Medicine, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
³ Faculty of Kinesiology, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Abstract

Purpose: To determine the contribution of recall bias to the observed excess in mental ill-health in those reporting harassment at work.

Methods: A prospective cohort of 1885 workers in welding and electrical trades was contacted every six months for up to 5 years, asking whether they were currently anxious or depressed and whether this was made worse by work. Only at the end of the study did we ask about any workplace harassment they had experienced at work. We elicited sensitivity and specificity of self-reported bullying from published reliability studies and formulated priors that reflect the possibility of over-reporting of workplace harassment (exposure) by those whose anxiety or depression was reported to be made worse by work (cases). We applied the resulting misclassification models to probabilistic bias analysis (PBA) of relative risks.

Results: We observe that PBA implies that it is unlikely that biased misclassification due to the study subjects' states of mind could have caused the entire observed association. Indeed, the results demonstrated that doubling of risk of anxiety or depression following workplace harassment is plausible, with the unadjusted relative risk attenuated with understated uncertainty.

Conclusions: It seems unlikely that risk of anxiety or depression following workplace harassment can be explained by the form of recall bias that we proposed.

Keywords: Anxiety; Bullying; Depression; Differential misclassification of exposure; Harassment; Information bias; Occupational; Probabilistic bias analysis; Quantitative bias analysis.