Ethnicity and work-related stress: Migrant workers in Southern Italy

Abstract

Introduction and objectives. Ethnicity and culture represent a novel topic in the literature on stress and wellbeing at work and there has been very little research on ethnicity and occupational health, and even less on discrimination experiences, cultural identity, acculturation strategies and health outcomes among workers. One of the major problems with the limited previous research on ethnicity and occupational health is that it has failed to consider important issues related to these cultural dimensions and their potential role in a transactional model of stress. This study aims to investigate the associations between individual differences in the forms of coping styles and types of personality, work characteristics, ethnicity aspects, perceived job satisfaction/stress and psychophysical health conditions in a sample of migrant and Italian workers in South Italy and to propose a general model that integrates ethnicity and work-related stress in a transactional perspective. Methods. The groups were: Eastern European care workers for elderly people (N=250), Moroccan factory workers (N=250), Ghanaian masons (N=200), Italian factory workers (N=100) and masons (N=100). For each ethnic group we have selected control groups of Italians that worked in the same sectors, except for the Eastern Europeans because these jobs are almost exclusively filled by these women and it was difficult to find Italians that did this job. The follow questionnaire divided into 5 sections was submitted: Section 1: respondent's personal and biographical details (e.g., gender, age, nationality, education) and job characteristics (e.g., employment, type of contract, number of hours worked); Section 2: individual characteristics; Coping Style Inventory (Cooper, Sloan, & Williams, 1988), Bortner's Type A Behavioural Style Inventory (Bortner, 1969), Type D Personality (Denollet, 2005); Section 3: cultural dimensions; Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM, Phinney, 1992), Berry's measures of acculturation (1997) and racial discrimination (a single item reported discrimination at work on the basis of race or ethnicity – Smith et al., 2000).; Section 4: work characteristics; Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ; Karasek, 1985), Effort-Reward Imbalance (ERI test; Siegrist, 1996); Section 5: psychophysical health; Symptom Checklist 90 R (SCL-90-R, Derogatis, 1994) and a single item asking Over the past 12 months, how would you say your general health has been? (Smith et al., 2000); Section 6: appraisals (perceived job satisfaction/stress); Job Satisfaction Scale (Warr, Cook & Wall, 1979), a single item asking In general, how do you find your job? (Smith et al., 2000). The methodology involved different types of statistical analyses including factor analysis, frequencies and percentages, crosstabs, chi square, logistic regression analysis and a meta-analysis of data. Results. The findings have shown the presence of significant different profiles of associations between ethnicity dimensions and individual differences, work characteristics, perceived job satisfaction/stress and health outcomes in migrant workers and supported many aspects of the proposed stress model. Conclusions. The study reported here indicated the importance of including ethnicity factors in work-stress research that could be helpful to develop multi-factor organisational interventions in multicultural society.