Modeling the relationship between occupational stressors, psychosocial/physical symptoms and injuries in the construction industry

Injury statistics place the construction industry as a high-risk industry, making it necessary to investigate factors that influence accidents to be able to protect workers. Research was carried out to investigate the relationship existing among occupational stressors, psychological/physical symptoms and accident/injury and work days lost outcomes as experienced by manual workers engaged in a range of industrial construction occupations. Some of the occupational stressors significantly associated with self-reported and OSHA logged injuries were training, job certainty and safety climate of the company. The OSHA logged injuries were associated with the occurrence of headaches and feelings of tenseness on the job. These results imply that non-physical stressors should be included as a potential input associated with injuries in injury risk models for construction workers. Relevance to industry: Traditional approaches to workers' safety in the construction industry have focused on the physical and biomechanical aspects of work by improving tools, equipment and task completion methods. The impact of psychosocial factors, specifically stress as experienced by construction workers, is an area of growing research, which is yielding results that suggest overall work safety on the construction site should take into account psychosocial aspects of work.