Occupational health psychology

Occupational health psychology (OHP) is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health and safety of workers. OHP addresses a number of major topic areas including the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, work-family balance, workplace violence and other forms of mistreatment, accidents and safety, and interventions designed to improve/protect worker health. OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational psychology, as well as occupational medicine. OHP has also been informed by other disciplines including industrial sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as well as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families. Thus the field's focus is work-related factors that can lead to injury, disease, and distress. Occupational health psychology (OHP) is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health and safety of workers. OHP addresses a number of major topic areas including the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, work-family balance, workplace violence and other forms of mistreatment, accidents and safety, and interventions designed to improve/protect worker health. OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational psychology, as well as occupational medicine. OHP has also been informed by other disciplines including industrial sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as well as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families. Thus the field's focus is work-related factors that can lead to injury, disease, and distress. The Industrial Revolution prompted thinkers, such as Karl Marx with his theory of alienation, to concern themselves with the nature of work and its impact on workers. Taylor's (1911) Principles of Scientific Management as well as Mayo’s research in the late 1920s and early 1930s on workers at the Hawthorne Western Electric plant helped to inject the impact of work on workers into the subject matter psychology addresses. About the time Taylorism arose, Hartness reconsidered worker-machine interaction and its impact on worker psychology. The creation in 1948 of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan was important because of its research on occupational stress and employee health. Research in the U.K. by Trist and Bamforth (1951) suggested the reduction in autonomy that accompanied organizational changes in English coal mining operations adversely affected worker morale. Arthur Kornhauser’s work in the early 1960s on the mental health of automobile workers in Michigan also contributed to the development of the field. A 1971 study by Gardell examined the impact of work organization on mental health in Swedish pulp and paper mill workers and engineers. Research on the impact of unemployment on mental health was conducted at the University of Sheffield’s Institute of Work Psychology. In 1970 Kasl and Cobb documented the impact of unemployment on blood pressure in U.S. factory workers. A number of individuals are associated with the creation of the term “occupational health psychology” or 'occupational health psychologist.' They include Ferguson (1977), Feldman (1985), Everly (1986), and Raymond, Wood, and Patrick (1990). In 1988, in response to a dramatic increase in the number of stress-related worker compensation claims in the U.S., the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) 'recognized stress-related psychological disorders as a leading occupational health risk' (p. 201). When this change was coupled with an increased recognition of the impact of stress on a range of problems in the workplace, NIOSH found that their stress-related programs were significantly increasing in prominence. In 1990, Raymond et al. argued that the time has come for doctoral-level psychologists to get interdisciplinary OHP training, integrating health psychology with public health, because creating healthy workplaces should be a goal for the field. Established in 1987, Work & Stress is the first and 'longest established journal in the fast developing discipline that is occupational health psychology' (p. 1). Three years later, the American Psychological Association (APA) and NIOSH jointly organized the first international Work, Stress, and Health conference in Washington, DC. The conference has since become a biannual OHP meeting. In 1996, the first issue of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology was published by APA. That same year, the International Commission on Occupational Health created the Work Organisation and Psychosocial Factors (ICOH-WOPS) scientific committee, which focused primarily on OHP. In 1999, the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology (EA-OHP) was established at the first European Workshop on Occupational Health Psychology in Lund, Sweden. That workshop is considered to be the first EA-OHP conference, the first of a continuing series of conferences EA-OHP organizes and devotes to OHP research and practice. In 2000 the informal International Coordinating Group for Occupational Health Psychology (ICGOHP) was founded for the purpose of facilitating OHP-related research, education, and practice as well as coordinating international conference scheduling. Also in 2000, Work & Stress became associated with the EA-OHP. In 2005, the Society for Occupational Health Psychology (SOHP) was established in the United States. In 2008, SOHP joined with APA and NIOSH in co-sponsoring the Work, Stress, and Health conferences. In addition, EA-OHP and SOHP began to coordinate biennial conferences schedules such that the organizations' conferences would take place on alternate years, minimizing scheduling conflicts. In 2017, SOHP and Springer began to publish an OHP-related journal Occupational Health Science. The main purpose of OHP research is to understand how working conditions affect worker health, use that knowledge to design interventions to protect and improve worker health, and evaluate the effectiveness of such 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 have been employed much less frequently. Longitudinal designs including prospective cohort studies and experience sampling studies can examine relationships over time. OHP-related research devoted to evaluating health-promoting workplace interventions has relied on quasi-experimental designs and, less commonly, experimental approaches. 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 known as multilevel modeling). HLM can better adjust for similarities between employees and is especially well suited to evaluating the lagged impact of work stressors on health outcomes; in this research context HLM can help minimize censoring and is well-suited to experience sampling studies. Meta-analyses have been used to aggregate data (modern approaches to meta-analyses rely on HLM), and draw conclusions across multiple studies.