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    • The objective of this study was therefore to investigate

    2018-11-02

    The objective of this study was therefore to investigate the prevalence, the effect of SES on prevalence and consequences of work-related physical assaults among people in large Japanese companies using data from the large-scale cross-sectional survey within the Japan Work Stress and Health Cohort Study (JSTRESS) (Kawakami et al., 2004).
    Methods
    Results
    Discussion Exposure to physical assaults was significantly associated with depression among both males and females even after adjusting demographic, occupational characteristics and worksite social support, which are in line with previous reports (Couto & Lawoko, 2011; Hogh et al., 2003, 2008; Virtanen et al., 2008; Wieclaw et al., 2006). Additionally, the magnitude of these odds ratios was similar or higher than previously reported (Virtanen et al., 2008; Wieclaw et al., 2006). On the other hand, the association of physical assaults with depression was significantly greater among employees of higher SES than those of lower SES, which was contrary to our GDC-0994 as well as reports that have shown strong association of low SES with depression and anxiety (Sakurai et al., 2010; Virtanen et al., 2008). One possible explanation for this is psychological preparedness, which may promote a sense of control over the trauma (Hoge, Austin, & Pollack, 2007). In other words, when workers do not have psychological preparedness for stressful events, they are more likely to suffer from serious psychological distress afterwards (Tsuno, Oshima, Kubota, & Kawakami, 2014). As general managers and white-collar employees are less likely to be exposed to physical assaults at their workplace, therefore, when he/she experienced it, he/she may experience delayed shocked and depression compared to blue-collar employees who are at high risk for these behaviors. Another possible explanation is that employees with high SES are more likely to suffer psychologically from interpersonal problems. Some studies have shown that the association of intergroup and intragroup conflicts with depression was greater among workers of high SES (Inoue & Kawakami, 2010; Tsuno et al., 2014). On the other hand, prevalence ratios became smaller both in high SES and low SES group after additionally adjusting worksite social support. In females, the significant association of physical assaults with depression was disappeared in the higher SES group when additionally adjusting worksite social support. This indicates that social support is an important predictor for depression with experience of physical assaults, especially in females. Although a bit different result was observed in females, the current study in general suggests that having higher education level or being in a white-collar profession strengthens the relationship between work-related physical assaults and depression. The overall 12-month prevalence of physical assaults in this study was 1.8%. Among males, younger employees under 29 years old who received no college/university education, unmarried, worked as a blue-collar worker and had low supervisor and coworker support were at the highest risk for exposure to physical assaults at work. On the other hand, blue-collar females were at the highest risk for exposure to physical assaults at work but high school graduates were at lower risk compared with university/graduate school graduates. This generally indicates that employees of low SES were at high risk for exposure to work-related physical assaults, which are in line with previous studies (Aytac et al., 2011; Virtanen et al., 2008; Tsuno et al., 2015). However, the mechanism as to why female high school graduates were less likely to be exposed to violence remains unknown. In this study, the number of female victims was small (n=58). Hence, future studies to investigate a larger group of samples are needed to clarify this gender difference. Although there are few studies on employees in large companies, the overall prevalence of physical assaults in this study was higher than those of Danish, British and Korean representative workers sample (Clark et al., 2012; Hogh et al., 2003; Lee et al., 2014) but lower than Turkish (Aytac et al., 2011) and EU studies (Parent-Thirion et al., 2007). Although anther is hard to compare these prevalence because our sample was not representative, our results show a number of company employees suffered from physical assaults from their clients, customers, or colleagues while working, which is unexpected because such reports were not previously available and the prevalence among general employees was previously unknown in the Japanese society. The reason why gender differences for overall prevalence was not observed in this study is potentially due to the number of blue-collar females in this study since blue-collar employees were more likely to experience physical assaults. This may overestimate the prevalence of physical violence among females.