Psychosocial work environment among Swedish audiologists

Abstract

Objective: The study examined the self-reported psychosocial work environment for audiologists working in three practice types (public, completely private, and private but publicly funded). Design: A cross-sectional e-mail survey using the demand-control-support questionnaire, a short version of the effort-reward imbalance (ERI) questionnaire, and descriptive data. Study sample: Five-hundred Swedish licensed audiologists. Results: Overall, the results indicate differences in psychosocial work environment pertaining to the practice types. These differences are small and the type explains few percent of the variability accounted in the measures of psychosocial work environment. Social support seems important for the psychosocial work environment and is considered a reward in itself. Using the demand-control model, 29% of the audiologists reported working in a high-stress psychosocial work environment. Using the ERI-ratio to estimate the imbalance between effort and reward it was shown that that 86% of the participants experienced an unfavorable work situation where the rewards do not correspond to the efforts made. Conclusions: The organizational framework has minor effect on self-reported psychosocial work environment for Swedish licensed audiologists. The percentage of unfavorable ERI-ratios seen in Swedish audiologists seems conspicuously high compared to other working populations in general, but also compared to other health service workers.

Key Words::

• Audiologist
• healthcare professional
• occupational stress
• organizational form

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Swedish Association of Audiologists (Svenska Audionomföreningen), but no outside grants were received. The authors are indebted to Susanne Rönngren at SRAT for administrating the survey.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interests. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.