| Summary: | <p>Jobs are an important determinant of mortality, influencing health through both the direct effects of physical exposure and psychological conditions, and the indirect effects of income, social status and lifestyle. This project investigates the relationship between job characteristics and incidence of mortality. 51 interpretable characteristics were extracted by factor analysis from the US Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database, and linked at the occupation level to the UK Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study. The sample consisted of n = 279,368 individuals from England and Wales whose occupations were recorded at the 2001 UK census. Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to examine the relationship between the occupation features and mortality over 15 years of follow-up (2003–2017). Models were fit which adjusted for socioeconomic status—as measured by education, marital status, housing status and vehicle ownership—and for self-reported health in 2001.</p>
<p>Repetitive work contexts—characterised by repetitive tasks, repetitive physical motions, high levels of automation and time pressure—predict the greatest mortality risk, with a hazard ratio of 1.39 (1.24, 1.56) under the model adjusted for socioeconomic status. Other results support previous findings, such as greater job control (here measured as “self-directedness”) and more technical occupations predicting lower mortality. These results are likely due to a mixture of the direct and indirect effects of occupations, as well as potential residual confounding. Further evaluation of the results—including model goodness-of-fit and sensitivity to alternative analysis choices—would be desirable.</p>
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