Are there bidirectional relationships between psychosocial work characteristics and depressive symptoms? A fixed effects analysis of Swedish national panel survey data.
OBJECTIVES
Psychosocial work characteristics have been prospectively associated with depressive symptoms. However, methodological limitations have raised questions regarding causality. It is also unclear to what extent depressive symptoms affect the experience of the psychosocial work environment. We examined contemporaneous (measured simultaneously) and lagged bidirectional relationships between psychosocial work characteristics and depressive symptoms, simultaneously controlling for time-stable individual characteristics.


METHODS
We included 3947 subjects in the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH), with self-reported job demands, control, social support, work efforts, rewards, procedural justice and depressive symptoms in four waves 2010-2016. We applied dynamic panel models with fixed effects, using structural equation modelling, adjusting for all time-stable individual characteristics such as personality and pre-employment factors.


RESULTS
Higher levels of job demands, job demands in relation to control, work efforts and efforts in relation to rewards were contemporaneously associated with more depressive symptoms (standardised β: 0.18-0.25, p<0.001), while higher levels of workplace social support, rewards at work and procedural justice were associated with less depressive symptoms (β: -0.18, p<0.001,β: -0.16, p<0.001 and β: -0.09, p<0.01, respectively). In contrast, only work efforts predicted higher levels of depressive symptoms 2 years later (β: 0.05, p<0.05). No other lagged associations were found in any direction.


CONCLUSIONS
After controlling for all time-invariant confounding, our results suggest that psychosocial work characteristics predominantly affect depressive symptoms immediately or with only a short time lag. Furthermore, we found no evidence of reverse causation. This indicates short-term causal associations, although the temporal precedence of psychosocial work characteristics remains uncertain.
['Åhlin|Julia K|JK|0000-0002-3642-6391', 'LaMontagne|Anthony D|AD|0000-0002-5811-5906', 'Magnusson Hanson|Linda L|LL|']
D000328:Adult D000368:Aged D003863:Depression D004651:Employment D005260:Female D006801:Humans D008137:Longitudinal Studies D008875:Middle Aged D009784:Occupational Diseases D012935:Social Justice D012944:Social Support D013548:Sweden D016526:Workload D017132:Workplace
depression effort-reward imbalance model job-demand-control-support model longitudinal studies organizational justice