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

Ning Wang, Can Wang, Limin Hou and Bing Fang
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Ning Wang: Department of Information Management, School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Can Wang: Department of Information Management, School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Limin Hou: Department of Information Management, School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China
Bing Fang: Department of Information Management, School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 24, 1-19

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.

Keywords: employee stressors; user-generated content; qualitative content analysis; JD-R theory; mental health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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