Nosenose

An ESRC Research Centre

ICLS Occasional Paper 5.4
The effect of the recession on work stress
Traani Chandola, ICLS & Manchester University

About ICLS Occasional Papers Series:
The ICLS Occasional Papers Series makes available presentations by or to
ICLS members which have not been published elsewhere.
Queries resulting from ICLS Occasional Papers, including requests to
reproduce theinformation presented, should be directed to ICLS
Administrative Office at University College London (Email: icls@publichealth.ucl.ac.uk).
This is one of four papers prsented at the NatCen/ ICLS/ESRC Policy
seminar on Unemployment, Recession and Health hosted at UCL in
December 2010. Detail of the other papers can be found at the end of this
document or on the ICLS website.

ICLS OccasionalPaper 5.4 – February 2011
Work and Stress. Tarani Chandola, Manchester University & ICLS
www.ucl.ac.uk/icls
Page - 1 - of 13

Slides 1
Please help yourself to a
copy of this publication if
you’re interested. It’s
work that was funded by
the British Academy. And
we had a launch a few
weeks ago so apologies
to a few of you that I can
remember were at the
launch. This presentation
issimilar.
We’ve already heard
from
the
previous
speakers about the long
term scarring effects of unemployment. And we also heard from Ellen Flint
(OP5.2) about how unemployment and insecure employment could have
relatively similar effects on psychological well-being. And that’s in a sense one
of the themes of the publication. It’s about what’s better. Is it better to have
any job, nomatter how bad the job is, than to have no job at all? So given that
most of the people I work with are survey people let me do an informal survey
now. Hands up, how many people actually support the notion that any job is
better than no job. Hands up. Any job is better than no job. A few takers, only
a few takers. How many people believe the other way that actually … [counts]
, got the majorityhere.
Well, okay, so you know, there always is this tension, within a recession or
out of a recession there is tension between job quality versus creating more
jobs. And in a recession in particular this balance between job quality and
creating more jobs gets out of kilter in effect. So the policy from this
government and the previous government is we need to get more people into
work.That’s a very clear message.
I wanted to come back to one a point a member of the audience . raised
earlier but he seems to be out of the room. I’ll wait till he comes back to
respond to his questions, What shall we do about getting people with mental
health disabilities back into work. And I wanted to refer to some great
research that has been done about that.
Slide 2
The structure of thispresentation is shown here (next page, right). About the
first point - measuring work stress - there’s been so much material about this.
To sum up: there is no gold standard measure for work stress. There
absolutely isn’t. We have to use very subjective measures of work stress, self
reported measures of work stress. The one good thing is now people separate
out the stress reaction.

ICLSOccasional Paper 5.4 – February 2011
Work and Stress. Tarani Chandola, Manchester University & ICLS
www.ucl.ac.uk/icls
Page 2 of 13

So when we talk about
the stress reaction we’re
talking about what Ellen
Flint (OP5.2) was talking
• Measuring work stress
about - psychological
• Trends
well-being
or
physiological reactions or
• Determinants
other kinds of mental
• Costs
healthcomplications or
• Managing work stress
behavioural
problems
that people get as a
result
of
addictive
behaviours, for example.
So it’s very easy and
important to separate out
those stress reactions from the stress generating conditions.
When we’re talking about work stress we’re actually talking about those work
stressors, those things at work that generate these kind of stress reactions....