Research group Daniel Falkstedt
The research activities and interest of the group revolve around the effect of common ergonomic and psychosocial work environment factors on people’s health and, by extension, their opportunities for productive work throughout life.
We are interested in variation in "working-life expectancy" and "lost years" during working life, and the contribution of different occupations and organizational factors to explain this. The research and interest also concern the work environment factors' potential connection to inequality in people’s health and opportunities for productive work in society. And since factors outside work, sometimes already present in the years before entering working life, are important for the overall picture, a so-called life-course perspective is applied in the research.
By ergonomic and psychosocial work-environment factors, we mean, for example, physical movements and loads, psychological demands and workers' influence over tasks, other occupational stressors, and social support. One way to investigate the impact of these factors for people’s health and opportunities for productive work is to design and use "occupational exposure matrices". This is done by linking information, for example self-reported information, about different factors in the work environment to occupational titles and then applying estimated exposure levels to different study populations.
In our research studies, we use, for example, data from various Swedish population registers, data from public health surveys from residents in the Stockholm region, data from the previous compulsory military conscription examinations in Sweden, and data from historical cohorts of school children that can be followed up regarding labor market participation, occupational conditions, and adult health. Data from population registers have been used to create the Swedish Work, Illness, and Labor-Market Participation Cohort, SWIP.