Live Poster Session: Zoom Link
Abstract: Overworking has long been seen to have a negative impact on both physical and mental health. Labor movements in the 20th century pushed for a standard workweek of 40 hours, yet many people are still forced to work far more than that. A rise in unstable employment has forced more people to work multiple jobs, which is also seen to impact health negatively. The gap in previous studies that investigate the relationship between work and health lies in examining how overworking affects the physical and mental health of adults who were healthy as children. The observed sample was drawn from waves 1 and 5 of AddHealth and includes the responses of 3,492 participants who deemed themselves healthy as children in wave 1 (1994-1995), tracking their health through wave 5 (2016-2018). Physical and mental health variables were observed as the response variables, and hours worked per week and number of jobs held were observed as explanatory variables, along with possible moderators such as household income, race, and gender. After regression analyses, no significant relationships between overworking and decline in physical or mental health were found, except for a significant association between working multiple jobs and adult diagnoses of either depression or anxiety amongst the entire sample (p-value = 0.027). Spotty results in this study demand a further investigation of the impact that working long hours or working multiple jobs has on an individual, as one prior studies’ results were confirmed, and many studies’ results were not supported by this study.