The relationship between shift work and mental health among electronics workers in South Korea: A cross-sectional study

Mo-Yeol Kang, Ho-Jang Kwon, Kyung-Hwa Choi, Chung-Won Kang and Hyunjoo Kim

PLOS ONE, 2017, vol. 12, issue 11, 1-10

Abstract: Objective: To determine the relationship between shift work and mental health, particularly insomnia, depression, and suicidal ideation, among electronics production workers. Methods: A survey was conducted with 14,226 workers from an electronics manufacturer in South Korea. After excluding 112 individuals with incomplete responses, 14,114 respondents were analyzed. As part of a larger project, we collected data on respondents’ general characteristics, work-related characteristics, and health status; however, in this study, we focused on the data related to shift work and mental health. Insomnia, depression, and suicidal ideation were set as dependent variables and working schedule as set as the independent variable. We performed multiple logistic regression analysis with daytime workers as the reference group. The model was adjusted for age, gender, body mass index, workplace, educational level, and marital status with or without children under 6 years of age. Results: Relative to daytime workers, shift workers had 2.35, 1.23, and 1.17 greater odds of insomnia, depression, and suicidal ideation, respectively. Within the shift worker group, we found that the odds of depression and suicidal ideation increased dramatically when respondents had insomnia. The ORs for depression and suicidal ideation were 4.899 and 7.934, respectively. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that shift work is related to an increased risk of mental health problems in production workers, and the sleep disturbance related with shift work is a central mechanism for this relationship. Since these results suggest that proactive management of sleep problems might attenuate their detrimental effects on shift worker’s mental health.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0188019 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 88019&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0188019

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0188019

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().