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A Life Course Perspective on Work Stress and Health

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Work Stress and Health in a Globalized Economy

Part of the book series: Aligning Perspectives on Health, Safety and Well-Being ((AHSW))

Abstract

Research in epidemiology highlights the necessity to adopt a life course perspective that considers different stages of the life course to explain health or diseases later on. For example, recent studies now show links between stress during working life and health in older ages. This is an important development and points to the recent advancements of analysing longitudinal data to link past exposures with outcomes at later stages of an individual’s life. But this is only one aspect of the life course perspective. In fact, life course research has much more to offer for the study of work stress and health than studying long-term effects of an earlier life exposure on later life health. The life course perspective also draws the attention to a set of important principles that shape individual life courses, and thereby could help to elucidate the development of health and diseases in an extended framework. These principles, in particular, draw attention to the importance of accumulation and duration of disadvantages throughout the life course, further, to consider the timing of exposures within individual life courses, and also, its ordering and embeddedness within larger employment trajectories. Along these lines, the present chapter first briefly summarizes the core concepts of the life course perspective, and illustrates what they offer for the study of long-term associations between work stress and health. We then describe studies on work stress and health addressing the life course perspective.

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Acknowledgements

The Research presented in this chapter has partly been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG project number: WA 3065/3-1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Medical Sociology, Center for Health and Society, Medical Faculty, University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Morten Wahrendorf

  2. School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Tarani Chandola

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Correspondence to Morten Wahrendorf .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Life Science Centre, University of Düsseldorf Life Science Centre, Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Johannes Siegrist

  2. Institute for Medical Sociology, University of Düsseldorf Institute for Medical Sociology, Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

    Morten Wahrendorf

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Wahrendorf, M., Chandola, T. (2016). A Life Course Perspective on Work Stress and Health. In: Siegrist, J., Wahrendorf, M. (eds) Work Stress and Health in a Globalized Economy. Aligning Perspectives on Health, Safety and Well-Being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32937-6_3

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