Work continues to be a central social aspect of a person's life providing meaning and identity throughout the lifecourse, ultimately influencing mortality. The proposed research will use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), an ongoing longitudinal survey of U.S. Households begun in 1968 with mortality follow-up through 1992, to resolve several major issues regarding the relationship between psychosocial work conditions and mortality, and assess whether work life is causally related to mortality. The PSID data constitute an unprecedented opportunity to establish a 'data laboratory' for studying 25 consecutive years of work environment exposure history and how exposures over the life course relate to mortality in a national cohort including working women and blacks.

The proposed research has three specific aims, as follow: (1) to examine how psychosocial work conditions influence survival; (2) to explore how the progression of a person's career, the arrangement of jobs within the context of an individual's worklife, influences survival; and (3) to describe how survival rates vary by race and gender.

The four major hypotheses are as follow: (1) hazardous psychosocial work conditions will predict mortality after adjustment for hazardous physical and environmental conditions of work; (2) the progression of careers will influence mortality after adjustment for hazardous working conditions; (3) the relationship between working life (exposure to hazardous working conditions and the progression of careers) and mortality will vary by race and gender; and (4) non-work burdens (e.g., household work or stressful residential neighborhoods) and resources (e.g., social support) will differentially influence racial and gender survival rates.

A sub-sample of approximately 4,500 adults age 25 to 65 who were working in 1968 and followed until 1992 comprise the cohort. About 1,000 deaths have occurred during the follow-up period. Data analysis will employ proportional hazard models with and without time-dependent covariates. To avoid potential biases of self-reported work conditions, exposures are imputed from three-digit occupational codes to establish up to 25 years of exposure history. Hazardous physical and environmental work conditions are also assigned to individuals based on the three-digit occupational code improving the precision of the estimate of the relationship of psychosocial work conditions to survival. With year-to-year determination of occupation, the bias introduced by retrospective assessment of occupation is avoided.

The investigators state that the proposed research significantly improves on previous analyses by examining the dynamics of the relationship between hazardous work and health including the selection of workers out of the workforce due to work-related disability and the movement of individuals from more hazardous psychosocial work conditions to less hazardous conditions. In addition, they state they will compare, for the first time, the two methods used for describing psychosocial work conditions -- one based on job ratings in the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, and the other using aggregate measures of job stress from national quality of employment surveys.

R01AG013036

1996-05-01

2000-04-30