Occupational Stress and Health Among Men and Women in the Tecumseh Community Health Study

Abstract

This paper reports data from the Tecumseh Community Health Study relating measures of occupational characteristics and stresses collected in 1967-69 to biomedical and questionnaire assessments of health behavior and morbidity taken at the same time, and to mortality over the succeeding nine-to-twelve-year period. Overall, our findings show only slight evidence of associations between job characteristics or stresses and health behavior and morbidity. Consistent with prior research, however, the few positive associations found among the employed-irrespective of sex-are strongest between job pressures or demands, and health behavior and morbidity. By contrast, job rewards and satisfactions and occupation-education discrepancies show little consistent relation to health behavior and morbidity, while differences by occupation and self-employment are modest. None of the 1967-69 reported job characteristics and stresses, all of which were ascertained in a single data collection, predicts mortality by 1979. However, in a subsample of 288 men first interviewed in 1967-69 and still working and reinterviewed in 1970, those with moderate to high levels of job pressures or tensions at both interview points were three times as likely to die between 1970 and 1979 as men whose level of pressure or tension was low on at least one interview point, even if high at the other. Future research must monitor subjectively experienced stress over time if we are to relate such stress to types of morbidity or mortality that have a long etiology.