Are Flexible Work Arrangements Associated with Lower Levels of Chronic Stress-Related Biomarkers? A Study of 6025 Employees in the UK Household Longitudinal Study
By T. Chandola, C. Booker, Meena Kumari, M. Benzeval. Sociology, 2019
98 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Debates around the benefits of flexible work arrangements for employee well-being are limited by a lack of empirical analyses on whether flexible working enables employees with work or family stressors to cope with their levels of stress. This study examines whether the availability and use of different flexible work arrangements are associated with lower allostatic load (an index of chronic stress-related biomarkers) in a large representative study of UK adults. Male and female employees who made use of reduced hours working arrangements had lower levels of allostatic load. Among women caring for two or more children aged under 15, there was a difference of almost one unit of the allostatic load index (an additional biomarker risk) between women who used reduced hours flexible work and those without such arrangements. Reduced hours flexible work arrangements could enable women who combine work and family roles to reduce their levels of chronic stress.
Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fbb99477078b9d3e738d4cf870e976d644ebef3c
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In General Health Professions
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the care burden of women and families (2020, background): “According to a large biological study of eleven key indicators of chronic stress levels in the UK, working mothers with two children were found under pre-pandemic conditions to be 40% more stressed than the average person (Chandola et al. 2019).”