Job quality and construction workers’ mental health: Life course perspective

Psychosocial job quality has been proven to be linked to workers’ mental health. Drawing on a life course perspective, this study sought to identify, compare, and contrast the psychosocial characteristics of job quality that are related to mental health in three age groups of manual/nonmanagerial construction workers, i.e., young workers, middle-aged workers, and older workers. Data were extracted from the national and longitudinal Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey data set. The study used 15 waves of data from the HILDA survey with 6,352 responses from 1,768 participants. Longitudinal random-intercept regression models were used to examine the association between each of five aspects of job quality (i.e., job demands and complexity, job control, perceived job security, effort-reward fairness, and job intensity) and mental health. Overall, the research results showed that construction workers’ mental health declined when experiencing adverse job conditions and the magnitude of decline increased as the number of job adversities increased. Specifically, workers of the midage group experienced more accelerated decline in mental health compared with the other two groups when experiencing two adverse job conditions. Age-related differences were also identified in the way that individual job quality aspects are related to mental health. Although low job security and perceived unfairness of effort and reward were significant predictors of mental ill-health in all age groups, job demand and complexity and high job intensity were predictors of mental ill-health in midage and older construction workers but were not significant contributors to mental ill-health among younger workers. The findings highlight the need to develop targeted approaches to protecting and promoting the mental health of construction workers in different age groups.