Recovery from Job Strain within Different Industries: Do the recovery experiences act universally across industries?

Abstract

This study was a comparative study on the differences in recovery from job strain between different industrial groups. Previous studies have not properly investigated whether there are any differences in recovery between different occupational groups, thus this study took up, first of all, to study whether there are any differences in recovery from job strain between five different industries. Secondly, because recovery experiences have been found to be highly related with job situational factors, the study aimed to test whether there are interactions between the recovery experiences and industries with varying situational factors on the recovery outcome. The industries represented in this study were retail trade, information and communication, accommodation and food services, air travel services, and education. The recovery experiences were psychological detachment, relaxation, mastery and control during off-job time measured with the Finnish Recovery Experience Questionnaire. The measure of need for recovery was used as the recovery outcome. The data of the study was collected by a questionnaire as a part of a large research project by University of Tampere in 2006-2009. 527 participants answered to the questionnaire anonymously.

There were two sets of analyses within the study. The first set tested differences in need for recovery between the industries with one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Furthermore, the aim was also to describe which job situational variables and recovery experiences contribute to the differences. Therefore the analysis was repeated with control variables of job demands and resources, and with the four recovery experiences. Also, age and gender were used as control variables since they have also been found to be related with need for recovery. The test of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used in case of the continuous control variables, and the test of two-way ANOVA was used with the categorical variable of gender. The second set of analysis aimed to test the interaction effect between the type of industry and the recovery experiences. Here, the recovery experiences were divided as categorical variables from the median score. A between subjects two-way ANOVA was used to test the interaction effect. There were four separate analyses for each recovery experience. Within the analyses it was also tested whether there would be differences in need for recovery between low and high levels of each recovery experience.

It was found, first of all, that there were differences in need for recovery between the industries. More closely, people working in information and communication industry had significantly lower need for recovery than people working in both education, and accommodation and food services industries. The situational factors were contributing to the levels of need for recovery, especially in the industry of education. Further, it was found that need for recovery was significantly lower within groups of high recovery experience than within groups of low recovery experience in case of each of the recovery experiences. This result was also consistent across all the industries, since no interaction was detected, suggesting thus that the recovery experiences have an industrially universal nature.