Protocol of the STRess at Work (STRAW) Project: How to Disentangle Day-to-Day Occupational Stress among Academics Based on EMA, Physiological Data, and Smartphone Sensor and Usage Data.

Larissa Bolliger,Mitja Luštrek,Junoš Lukan,Dirk De Bacquer,Els Clays

doi:10.3390/ijerph17238835

Abstract

Several studies have reported on increasing psychosocial stress in academia due to work environment risk factors like job insecurity, work-family conflict, research grant applications, and high workload. The STRAW project adds novel aspects to occupational stress research among academic staff by measuring day-to-day stress in their real-world work environments over 15 working days. Work environment risk factors, stress outcomes, health-related behaviors, and work activities were measured repeatedly via an ecological momentary assessment (EMA), specially developed for this project. These results were combined with continuously tracked physiological stress responses using wearable devices and smartphone sensor and usage data. These data provide information on workplace context using our self-developed Android smartphone app. The data were analyzed using two approaches: 1) multilevel statistical modelling for repeated data to analyze relations between work environment risk factors and stress outcomes on a within- and between-person level, based on EMA results and a baseline screening, and 2) machine-learning focusing on building prediction models to develop and evaluate acute stress detection models, based on physiological data and smartphone sensor and usage data. Linking these data collection and analysis approaches enabled us to disentangle and model sources, outcomes, and contexts of occupational stress in academia.

Highlights

While work in academia used to be seen as relatively stress free, the number of studies reporting increasing psychosocial stress in the field of university research is growing
A study on burnout among academics reported work-family conflict, being involved in earning research grants, administrative paperwork, and overall high quantitative workload as further work environment risk factors experienced by researchers, making it an interesting target group for occupational stress research [2]
The experience and expertise of these two fields present the opportunity to collaborate on an innovative combination of several aspects: (1) we focus on day-to-day stress and not on chronic stress, (2) we detect stress in real-world settings, meaning at work and not in lab studies in which participants get exposed to artificially created stress situations, and (3) we measure work environment risk factors and stress outcomes repeatedly, meaning more than twice, over a short period of time as compared to traditional longitudinal and follow-up studies

Summary

Introduction

While work in academia used to be seen as relatively stress free, the number of studies reporting increasing psychosocial stress in the field of university research is growing. Lack of personal or professional development at work, incongruence between the researcher and the institute concerning freedom and independence at work, and lack of recognition of peers, are factors associated with an increased level of stress among researchers [1]. A study on burnout among academics reported work-family conflict, being involved in earning research grants, administrative paperwork, and overall high quantitative workload as further work environment risk factors experienced by researchers, making it an interesting target group for occupational stress research [2]. One focus of researchers in the field of psychosocial occupational epidemiology has been set on various chronic exposures to psychosocial stress and its adverse. Public Health 2020, 17, 8835; doi:10.3390/ijerph17238835 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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