Work-related Stress: Different Techniques to Compare Measures and Determinants

Unfavourable working conditions are a prominent issue in the field of economic and social studies. The topic has been deeply investigated, especially in order to build intrinsic job quality indices. Many psycho-social risks that negatively impact on workers’ health and well-being, such as a very high work intensity and work-related stress, have become key matters of interest. We explore two different analytical tools to measure work-related stress, detecting the effects of subjective, environmental and economic variables on the response patterns of a large sample of respondents. We discuss some results obtained through a model belonging to the class of generalized CUB models which is worthwhile for this kind of surveys; in addition, a multiple indicator, multiple independent cause (MIMIC) model is employed to interpret work-related stress concept as a latent variable, which manifests itself through a number of indicators and it is influenced by a number of exogenous variables. Specifically, we analyze the perceived stress self-assessments using data collected in the fifth European Working Conditions Survey carried out by Eurofound in 2010.