Construction Workers’ Well-Being: What Leads to Depression, Anxiety, and Stress?

Abstract

Work-related stress is an important issue in any industry, particularly for construction workers where stressful environments are frequently encountered. Critical questions are therefore: what are the primary stressors in the construction workplace ; and what are the relationships between the strain effect of psychological distress and the countermeasures and coping mechanisms used by construction workers? The first question was addressed using Qmethodology survey with 18 participants. The results show that time and personal finance, and the task nature of the work, are important stressors. For the second question, a questionnaire survey administered to 91 participants on two construction sites of a single contractor was used to collect data about the stressors, psychological strain effects and coping strategies they used. Mediated regression analysis of the data showed that lack of personal and family time, increases in the cost of living, and fears about job security all act as powerful stressors. Coping strategies including acceptance, self-blame, and disengagement are associated with higher levels of psychological distress. Increased substance use, while associated with lower levels of anxiety, may only be a short term coping mechanism. An anomaly was found with humour as a coping strategy, where the relationship was found to be counter-intuitive and contrary to the findings of previous research. Future research should examine this more closely. Employers should better inform workers about the negative effects of maladaptive coping strategies, and offer opportunities for adopting more positive alternatives.

Prevalent Health Problems among Nepalese Underground Construction Workers

“…Nature of tasks, lack of personal and family time, increase in the cost of living, and fears about job security act as powerful stressors. Coping strategies including acceptance, self-blame, substance abuse, and disengagement are associated with higher levels of psychological distress [ 26 ]. Another study identified missing special events (86%), relationship problems with partners (68%), financial stress (62%), shift rosters (62%), and social isolation (60%) as stressors among mining and construction workers [ 27 ].…”

Evaluating the Impacts of Health, Social Network and Capital on Craft Efficiency and Productivity: A Case Study of Construction Workers in China

“…For physical health management, many prior studies focused on discussing the relationship between physical health and safety, including integrating safety and health performance into construction management [ 56 , 57 , 58 ], and analysing critical factors related to physical health on construction workplace safety management [ 7 , 30 , 59 ]. Therefore, many methods preventing construction worker injury incidents through the management of personal physical stress and organizational stressors are proposed, including reducing daily working hour and years, as well as improving rest time, sleeping time and the frequency of physical examination [ 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 , 64 ]. For mental health management, construction workers’ occupation and the surrounding context affecting their mental health could be grouped into four key themes: the importance of relationships, the impact of lifestyle, work characteristics, and mental health attitudes [ 53 , 65 , 66 ].…”

Respect for People’S Well-Being: Meditation for Construction Workers

“…Studies indicate that the mechanisms to face stressful events, adopted by construction workers, lead to worse feelings of psychological suffering (Langdon and Sawang 2017).…”

“…There are two particular coping styles in response to managing a stressful situation: problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping (Langdon and Sawang 2017).The practice of meditation appears to be beneficial in environments where people have high levels of stress, such as the workplace (Cramer et al 2016;Elder 2014). During meditation, our experiences are not intentionally confronted, but only observed, and its practice turns into learning how not to be negatively influenced by understanding facts as mere mind flows (Teasdale 1999).…”