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NIOSH Programs > WorkLife Initiative > NIOSH Funded Research Grants
WorkLife InitiativeActivities: NIOSH Funded Research GrantsNIOSH sponsors research and training through its extramural programs, which complement the Institute's intramural programs. More information is available from the NIOSH Office of Extramural Programs. Prevention Work Injuries and Chronic Illnesses in TruckersThis study of commercial truck drivers will address the prevention of poor health status, injuries, chronic illnesses and diseases by: Aim (1) identifying risk factors and prevalence of these problems among 1,000 commercial truck drivers from a cross sectional study drawn from many companies in 2 diverse states, Aim (2) comparing the most recent Commercial Driver Medical Examination (CDME) results with additional questions, blood tests and urinalyses for potential improvements in the CDME, and Aim (3) developing and pilot-testing a truck driver health promotion program (Worksite Health, Eating and Exercising for the Long Haul, WHEEL). This study is designed to emphasize the factors that shorten truck driver's careers, result in shortened CDL certifications (< 2-year max.), and provide risks for motor vehicle crashes and other injuries. Aim 1. The spectrum of problems we are investigating includes the most common reasons for driver restrictions: diabetes mellitus, obesity, physical inactivity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease, tobacco use, sleep disorders, low back pain and over the counter and prescription medication use. Methods will include electronically administered questionnaires in small groups; measured height, weight, blood pressure, heart rate, neck/chest/waist/hip circumferences, urinalyses, and blood testing for fasting glucose, hemoglobin A1c, lipid profile, and highly sensitive C-reactive protein. Questions include self reported motor vehicle crashes, near miss crashes, and records of crashes. A nested case-control study will assess vibration exposures (random selection of 50 cases with and 100 controls without low back pain). Aim 2. Each subject's most recent CDME information will be evaluated by a blinded panel of physicians to categorize certification status. They will also separately categorize the CDME status based upon all measures from the entire battery of results from this study. Those factors found to be most important in changing certification status will be the highest candidates for recommendations to improve the CDME. Aim 3. Focus groups, questionnaires and truck stop visits will be used to develop the WHEEL program aimed at weight reduction considering the unique needs of these workers, including those risk factors and illnesses that preclude or shorten certifications. WHEEL will be pilot-tested on 35 truck drivers for acceptance and to determine effect size for design of a full intervention. Project contact: Kurt Hegmann Development of a Behavioral Measure of Supervisor Support for Work and FamilyThis study is the first to examine family-supportive behaviors that supervisors need that will lead to employee perceptions of managerial support for work and family. It is also the first to explicitly link conflicts between work and family demands to worker safety and the mental and physical health of workers and their families. We believe that this connection between how supervisors organize work (that is family-supportive supervisory behaviors) and communicate and administer work and family policies and work schedules will enhance U.S. public health and occupational health policy. Work characteristics such as the supervision, hours, characteristics, culture, location, and flexible scheduling of work can constrain an employee's ability to care for children, parents, and self and can bring the stresses of work into personal and family health. The design of work, public health, and employer policies has not been fully updated in the United States to accommodate the transformation of the work and family relationship. Although workplace studies are starting to demonstrate that supervisory support for work and family may be more important (or at least as important) as formal workplace policies and supports, the specific behaviors that supervisors should do in order to effectively help employees manage work and family conflicts have not been clearly nor specifically identified. Focus groups will be conducted to identify a list of family-supportive supervisor behaviors that help in reducing employees' work and family conflicts. We will then pilot test this measure with 500 unionized employees at Stop and Shop and Cole and Brown in the Northeast and Pacific Northeast working with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and management of these companies. We will relate employee results on the nature and extent of supervisor actions to key mental and physical safety and health outcomes for the employees and their families. Using a steering committee of managers, employees, and families, we will then conduct a pilot study to assess a training-intervention using a combination of face-to-face and computer-based training methods to evaluate effectiveness. This study will inform public health by determining if training specific supportive behaviors are effective at improving the safety, health, work, and family well-being of workers AND if so, determine which training intervention methods are most effective. It is the first study to explicitly link conflicts between work-family conflict and worker safety outcomes, in addition to worker health and family-related outcomes. We believe that this connection between the organization of work (i.e., supervisory behaviors that are supportive of work and family), work-family conflict, and safety outcomes, will make a significant contribution to the development of models, learning procedures, and measures of supervisor effectiveness that integrate the work-family interface and occupational health. Project contact: Leslie Hammer Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England WorkplaceThe Center for the Promotion of Health in the New England Workplace (CPH-NEW) is a cooperative initiative by investigators from two major public universities in the New England area, the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) and the University of Connecticut (UC), along with the private sector (St. Paul Travelers Insurance Company. Genesis HealthCare Corporation. Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety), labor (Massachusetts Nurses Association and the Connecticut Council for Occupational Safety and Health), and state government (Massachusetts and Connecticut Departments of Public Health). The key academic departments are Work Environment at UML and Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Occupational Health Psychology, and Health Promotion at UC. Strengths of CPH-NEW lie in extensive group experience in occupational health and safety (OHS), psychology, and health promotion and education (HPE); technical expertise in survey research and biostatistics; and educational and outreach infrastructure. Cross disciplinary collaboration will rest on both project- and methodology-oriented teams as well as on the investigators strongly established relationships. "Exploratory,-Efficacy, and Effectiveness" research project #1, "Promoting Physical and Mental Health of Caregivers Through Trans-disciplinary Intervention" will be conducted within Genesis HealthCare Corporation, a major East Coast provider of nursing home and assisted living care. A no-lift program in 217 facilities will be paired with two types of health promotion programs to compare worker health outcomes in sites with: 1) workplace intervention only; 2) both workplace intervention and HPE; and 3) workplace intervention plus a participatory health promotion program. Research Project #2, entitled "Health Improvement through Training and Employee Control (HITEC)," involves comparison of traditional HPE/workplace intervention with an experimental program featuring employee control. All sites will be St. Paul Travelers insured, paired on the basis of intervention type. The Education, Translation, Communication and Dissemination" project builds on Heart and Stroke Partnership plans developed by the MA and CT Departments of Health. The Center will develop curriculum and offer training sessions primarily on the relationship between work-related stress and the development of heart disease and stroke. CPE-NEW will greatly advance public health by integrating two core public health areas (OHS and HPE), thus linking primary prevention to the workplace, and the workplace to primary prevention. Project contact: Laura Punnett Healthier Workforce Center for ExcellenceThe Healthier Workforce Center for Excellence (HWCE) will be designed to improve our understanding of effective, integrated employee health programs and to translate this evidence base into practice for the benefit of employed populations. While the value of creating integrated health protection and health promotion programs has been described, there are many uncertainties related to practical implementation of such programs. It is not clear, for instance, how integration should best be achieved with regards to the following variables: private vs. public sector; type of work setting (e.g., manufacturing vs. high-tech); number and variety of job types in the particular workforce; effectiveness, availability, and utilization of existing health protection and health promotion resources; and the relative impact of company-, group-, and individual-level interventions. The HWCE will explore the effects of different integrated health protection/health promotion programs tailored to meet the needs of three different work environments: a health insurance company, a manufacturing firm, and a public university workforce that is decentralized, with widely varying job types. The Center's goals are: (1) To examine the relationships among predictors for absenteeism, work-related injury, workers' compensation claims, healthcare expenditures, and overall health. (2) To implement, evaluate, and compare three integrated health protection/health promotion models for the private and public sectors: (a) a policy approach to achieving integrated employee health; (b) an intervention based around an integrated worker safety/health promotion committee and (c) an intervention using a health counselor to integrate the delivery of health protection and health promotion services in a public sector setting; and (3) To establish a learning network of interactive partnerships with employers, employee groups including unions, and health care organizations. The policy-focused project will be evaluated with time series and cost effectiveness analyses. The worker safety/health promotion committee project will employ a quasiexperimental design with a delayed intervention component. The health counselor project will be a randomized controlled trial. And the learning network/education and translation project will be examined primarily using formative and process evaluation measures. The Center's research will improve public health by helping to develop workplaces that address employee health in a more effective, integrated fashion. The Center will also develop a learning network with employers, worker groups, universities, and others so that research findings can rapidly be put into practice in many settings throughout the U.S. Project contact: James Merchant Harvard School of Public Health Center for Excellence to Promote a Healthier WorkforceThe goal of the Harvard Center for Excellence to Promote a Healthier Workforce is to establish a sustainable trans-disciplinary program devoted to research, education, and dissemination that will facilitate the integration of occupational safety and health and workplace. The center will foster and expand collaborations with diverse employers, labor unions, and intermediary organizations to help shape the center's directions and to influence the dialogue among these constituencies regarding the application of integrated approaches to worker health. The leadership of this research team conducted the first research demonstrating the worker health benefits to be derived from integration of worksite health protection and health promotion. Building on solid institutional support, they have assembled an accomplished trans-disciplinary team with a track record of collaborative research, representing the diverse disciplines of occupational health and safety, social and behavioral sciences, social epidemiology, health education, medicine, economics, engineering, health communications, organizational behavior, nursing, law, and biostatistics,. The center will initiate research in two high-priority employment sectors, construction and health care, aimed at addressing priority research questions across the full span of research phases. Integrated worker health research is new to the health care sector, and accordingly, this study focuses on the early phases of research using social epidemiological methods, methods development, and preliminary intervention testing. Prior research in construction provides a firm foundation for full-scale testing in a randomized trial of an integrated respiratory health intervention aimed at silica exposure reduction and tobacco use cessation. A third project will train future and practicing professionals with a stake in worker health on skills and methods for integrating occupational health and safety and workplace health promotion, and will disseminate best practices and programs to key stakeholders and health professionals. In addition, strategically planned pilot projects will help to cultivate future research initiatives. This center application is aimed at actualizing a vision for the integration of occupational health and safety and worksite health promotion that goes beyond the simple sum of the parts, to envision a new trans-disciplinary culture, science, and practice, operationalized in our work and providing a national model for future research, education and dissemination in support of worker health. Project contact: Glorian Sorensen Origins and Health Impact of Relational Conflict at WorkThe overarching aim of the proposed study is to examine the effects of interpersonal relationships in the workplace on anger and physical health. It calls for two interviews, 20 months apart, with a national sample of 2,000 currently employed adults. The stress process framework, which posits that exposure to stressful role conditions can harm emotional and physical functioning, guides the proposed aims to 1) identify the structural sources and extent of interpersonal conflict in the workplace, 2) specify the origins of conflict in relation to social statuses, occupational status, and job conditions, 3) document the consequences of conflict for emotions and health, and 4) determine the mediating and moderating functions of the sense of mastery and supportive bonds in the workplace. Although interpersonal relationships in general can be a source of positive and negative emotions, the proposed inquiry focuses on those in the workplace because of the salience of work and its instrumental importance to other roles and well-being. The proposed study centers on the types of conflict involving actions that are particularly evocative of anger such as violations of self, perceived injustice or inequity, goal impediments, and experienced aggression. Potential sources of conflict are proposed to emerge at three levels: social statuses, occupational status and conditions, and the structure of relations in different role-set domains. We focus on the worker's relationships with superordinates (managers or supervisors), subordinates (people managed or supervised), customers or clients (the recipients of service), and other peers (coworkers). By employing a wide lens to assess the entire role-set, we can investigate the potentially different sources and effects of conflict while accounting for the complexity of organizational and authority structures Project contact: Scott Schieman Page last updated: November 14, 2008
Page last reviewed: October 28, 2008 Content Source: National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Division of Respiratory Disease Studies |
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NIOSH Program Portfolio:WorkLife Initiative |
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