Investigating Young Employee Stressors in Contemporary Society Based on User-Generated Contents.

Limin Hou,Ning Wang,Bing Fang,Can Wang

doi:10.3390/ijerph182413109

Abstract

Understanding stressors is an effective measure to decrease employee stress and improve employee mental health. The extant literature mainly focuses on a singular stressor among various aspects of their work or life. In addition, the extant literature generally uses questionnaires or interviews to obtain data. Data obtained in such ways are often subjective and lack authenticity. We propose a novel machine–human hybrid approach to conduct qualitative content analysis of user-generated online content to explore the stressors of young employees in contemporary society. The user-generated online contents were collected from a famous Q&A platform in China and we adopted natural language processing and deep learning technology to discover knowledge. Our results identified three kinds of new stressors, that is, affection from leaders, affection from the social circle, and the gap between dream and reality. These new identified stressors were due to the lack of social security and regulation, frequent occurrences of social media fearmongering, and subjective cognitive bias, respectively. In light of our findings, we offer valuable practical insights and policy recommendations to relieve stress and improve mental health of young employees. The primary contributions of our work are two-fold, as follows. First, we propose a novel approach to explore the stressors of young employees in contemporary society, which is applicable not only in China, but also in other countries and regions. Second, we expand the scope of job demands-resources (JD-R) theory, which is an important framework for the classification of employee stressors.

Highlights

LackIn authenticity, which make the turesquestionnaires may be inflated to common source bias addition, the datamay obtained studyquestionnaires results unrepresentative. For this we systematically investigated the multiple through and interviews arereason, subjective and lack authenticity, which may stressors based on user-generated contents (UGC)
After reviewing the chosen sentences, we identified four main categories of stressors for Chinese young employees mentioned frequently by users of “Zhihu”: working process, family life, social media, and subjective cognitive bias
Our results suggest that there are other stressors for employees that cannot be explained by job demands-resources (JD-R) theory: the sentences related to “rough time during the work” and “lack of social security” express that employees are often squeezed by their supervisor due to the lack of social guarantee of employee rights, which makes them feel exhausted

Summary

Introduction

Stress is an integral part of employees’ lives and occurs in a wide variety of work environments [1]. Employee stress is frequently defined as a work or personal related feeling of difficulty, frustration, depression, or tension. It is deemed as a harmful part of the work environment [2]. It can seriously undermine employee well-being, thereby provoking health-related impairments globally [3]. Employee stress may affect an employee’s family or personal life [4]. Fueled by adverse psychosocial working conditions, employee stress increases employee absence [5].

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion