Work stress, family stress, and suicide ideation: A cross-sectional survey among working women in Shenzhen, China

Abstract

Background: This study aimed to explore the associations of work characteristics, work stress, and family stress with suicide ideation among working women, further to detect potential joint effects between different types of stress.

Methods: From March to June in 2015, a cross-sectional survey on working women were conducted in Shenzhen, China. Demographic and work characteristics, work stress, family stress, and suicide ideation were collected. Multivariate logistic regression models were applied to assess possible associations by calculating the odds ratios (OR) and 95% confident intervals (CI).

Results: Totally 968 working women were included with a mean age of 31.62 (standard deviation: 7.43) years. The prevalence of suicide ideation was 19.4%. We found that night shift work, sickness absence, work stress, and family stress were positively associated with suicide ideation, after adjusting for age, education level, marital status, and occupation type. None joint effect on multiplicative or additive scale of work stress and family stress on suicide ideation was found (P for multiplicative and additive interaction: 0.736 and 0.595, respectively), however, women with both high work stress and high family stress appeared more than five-time odds of suicide ideation (OR: 5.253, 95%CI: 2.982∼9.252).

Limitations: We did not collect information on other psychosocial profiles and failed to explore potential mediated effects within current associations.

Conclusions: This study lends support to suicide prevention that immediate relief allocated to working women with both high level of work stress and family stress is warranted of necessity.

Keywords: Effort–reward imbalance; Family stress; Suicide ideation; Work characteristics; Work stress.