Age and education's influence on work related stress : A quantitative study about social workers' stress

The aim of this study was to investigate differences in the experience of work related stress, consequences of said stress and how the stress is coped with amongst social workers with the basis on age and education. This study has been accomplished through an online survey with a range of 50 questions sent to social workers with administrative work tasks throughout all of Sweden. These questions were split into three categories which were “work structure”, “health” and “leisure time”. The data was analyzed via so called Independent-Samples T-test through a computer to conduct the numbers. The data was later interpreted through a combination of Siegrist’s Effort-Reward-Imbalance model which was formed to understand work related stress in an organisation and different styles of coping coined by Hedrenius & Johansson. The study’s most significant results was an identified difference between younger and older social workers regarding estimated satisfaction with their general health. The older social workers estimated a lower satisfaction with their own general health than the younger social workers. We could also identify a significant difference in estimated work satisfaction between social workers with an education in social work and social workers with a different education background, perhaps more similar with treatment education. The social workers with a different education than social work estimated a higher level of work satisfaction than the social workers with a background of education in social work