Work Stress and Alcohol Use

Future Research
by National Institute of Health

(Page 5 of 5)

Although research on work stress and alcohol use is increasingly sophisticated, future research could benefit from several refinements. More attention needs to be devoted to the assessment of work stressors. In the 31 studies reviewed for this article, the most common work stressors studied were job demands, job control, and job complexity. The research evidence suggests that these stressors are related to alcohol use, but we do not know whether they are the most important work stressors. Thus, future research should be more systematic and inclusive in its assessment of work stressors. In addition, researchers often develop their own measures of work stressors, even though validated measures exist in the organizational behavior and occupational health literatures. Consequently, the comparability of studies is limited. This problem is partly remedied by Hurrell and colleagues' review describing work-stressor measures that could be helpful for future research. Because most research on work stress and alcohol use has used self-report measures of perceived stressors, more attention should be paid to developing and using objective measures of work stressors. For example, rather than relying on employee self-reports of whether the work environment is too noisy or the air quality is low, physical measurements of noise and air quality could be used. Likewise, trained observers might rate specific variables, such as workload or conflicts with customers. Examination of general models of work stress, including models of work-family conflict, developed outside the alcohol literature may provide additional insights for alcohol researchers.

Studies vary widely in the types of alcohol outcomes they assess. One issue is whether the type of alcohol outcome used affects the strength of the relation of work stressors and work-family conflict to alcohol use. Perhaps work stressors are more strongly related to increases in episodes of heavy drinking than they are to increases in average daily consumption. Such differences may explain some of the inconsistencies across studies. Another issue is that little attention has been paid to the context of alcohol use. Most studies use measures of overall alcohol use and have given almost no attention to on-the-job alcohol use. An interesting question is whether different relations exist between work stressors and measures of general versus onthe- job alcohol use.

The results summarized in this article demonstrate that the relation between work stress and alcohol consumption is more complex than implied by the simple cause-effect model. Therefore, more attention should be devoted to identifying and testing plausible mediating and moderating variables. Of the four models presented, the moderated mediation model may have the most potential for helping researchers understand the relation between work stress and alcohol use, because it simultaneously addresses the two fundamental issues of why and when work stressors are related to alcohol use.

In addition, future research should focus on how different developmental stages might play a role in the connection between work stressors and alcohol consumption. For example, the relation between work stressors and alcohol use may be more pronounced among adolescents and young adults because they are just entering the workforce and are the most likely to engage in heavy alcohol use. Extensive literature documents that the number of hours worked per week is cross-sectionally and longitudinally related to higher levels of alcohol use among employed adolescents. This finding suggests that employment has a causal influence on adolescent drinking. Because of the narrow focus on work hours, however, we do not know what it is about the work environment that promotes increases in adolescents' alcohol use. It could be exposure to work stressors, low social control, or the social and physical availability of alcohol. Frone and Windle provided initial evidence of the possible role of work stress. They found that job dissatisfaction was positively related to the frequency of drinking and the quantity consumed per drinking occasion in a sample of employed high school students.

The final issue for future research is the need for longitudinal studies of work stress and alcohol use. Crum and colleagues found that workload and job control predicted new cases of alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence over a 12-month period, and Frone and colleagues found that workfamily conflict predicted increases in heavy drinking over a 4-year period. Nonetheless, scant longitudinal data exist in the literature. Although we can conclude that work stressors and workfamily conflict are related to alcohol use, the causal direction of this relation is still unclear because of the heavy reliance on cross-sectional research designs. In future longitudinal research, daily or weekly diary studies (in which participants record their drinking behaviors and stressors each day) would be especially useful. Because variations in exposure to stressors and drinking behaviors may follow a short-term (daily or weekly) cycle, diary methods are likely to be more sensitive than traditional panel designs, which follow a group of study participants over time but collect data at time points that are separated by several months to several years.

About the Author

NIH is the nation's medical research agency - making important medical discoveries that improve health and save lives. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research.