Occupational Stress and Coping of Japanese Workers

144 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1985.Problem. Research shows that the mental health of the average Japanese worker is not nearly as good as one would be apt to infer from the glowing reports of Japan's phenomenal economical success. The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships between occupational stress, the employee's coping strategies, and the resulting mental health of Japanese workers. In particular, the roles of the employee's stress coping strategies in the above relationships were examined from the following three viewpoints: (a) the dimensionality of coping strategies in occupational stress situations; (b) the efficacy of coping strategies in the occupational stress situations; and (c) the validity of the occupational stress model which treats coping as a moderator between stress and mental health.Methods. The psychological instruments employed in the study were (a) chronic stress scale, (b) acute stress scale, (c) coping questionnaire, and (d) Hopkins Symptom Checklist. The data were provided from a survey of a total of 537 white collar employees from three different Japanese companies.Findings. The following findings were obtained as the results of multivariate analyses of the data: (1) Factor analyses showed that a tri-factorial structure in stress coping strategies exists (Problem-focused, Emotion-focused, and Fight and Fantasizing factors) and that this factorial structure is fairly stable through various stress situations. (2) Problem-focused coping was more conductive to good mental health than the others. Emotion-focused and Fight and Fantasizing coping were more related to depression and anxiety than Problem-focused coping was. (3) Significant relationships were observed between chronic stress and mental health but no significant relationship was found between acute stress and mental health. (4) Neither the moderated multiple regression analysis nor the subgroup method supported the hypothesized moderating effect of coping strategies in occupational stress--mental health relationships.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD