A mixture model for self-assessed stress at work across EU 163

Abstract

Occupational stress is currently considered a primary social issue as well as an extensive problem of public health. Latest research on risk factors at work displays that about 25% of workers state to experience work-related stress at least “most of the time”. A similar proportion also claim that their job may negatively affect their physical and psychological health and general well-being. Those evidence are usually collected by means of self-reported answers to several questions on working conditions which are often gathered on Likert scales. Implementing the CUB models, a class of mixture models suitable for ordinal data, this study aims to analyse the perception of occupational stress across European Union countries employing information from the European Working Conditions Survey dataset. Modelling results distinguishing by gender and job sustainability are presented. Results show that overall, there is a quite high perception of work-related stress among European workers, who reported their answers on work-related stress with a high degree of certainty. Results by gender show that on average, feeling estimations for women, is slightly higher than those for men. Looking at perceived job sustainability, some countries show higher levels of feeling for respondents who consider their jobs non-sustainable.