Fear and Trembling While Working in a Pandemic: an Exploratory Meta-Analysis of Workers’ COVID-19 Distress

The global COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of workers and taken its toll on health and well-being. In line with recent calls for more inductive and abductive occupational health science research, we exploratorily meta-analyzed workers’ COVID-19 distress, defined as psychological and psycho...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Occupational health science 2023-03, Vol.7 (1), p.39-69
Main Authors: Jimenez, William P., Katz, Ian M., Liguori, Elissa A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral Science and Psychology
COVID-19
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Mental disorders
Meta-analysis
Pandemics
Psychology
Quality of Life Research
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Review Article
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Summary:The global COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the lives of workers and taken its toll on health and well-being. In line with recent calls for more inductive and abductive occupational health science research, we exploratorily meta-analyzed workers’ COVID-19 distress, defined as psychological and psychosomatic strain contextualized to experiencing the virus and pandemic broadly. We identified many existing COVID-19 distress measures (e.g., Fear of COVID-19 Scale by Ahorsu et al., International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction , 2020 ; Coronavirus Anxiety Scale by Lee, Death Studies, 44 (7), 393–401, 2020a ) and correlates, including demographic variables (viz., gender, marital status, whether worker has children), positive well-being (e.g., quality of life, perceived social support, resilience), negative well-being (e.g., anxiety, depression, sleep problems), and work-related variables (e.g., job satisfaction, burnout, task performance). Additionally, we found preliminary evidence of subgroup differences by COVID-19 distress measure and country-level moderation moderators (viz., cultural values, pandemic-related government response) as well as COVID-19 distress’s incremental validity over and above anxiety and depression. The findings—based on k  = 135 independent samples totaling N  = 61,470 workers—were abductively contextualized with existing theories and previous research. We also call for future research to address the grand challenge of working during the COVID-19 pandemic and ultimately develop a cumulative occupational health psychology of pandemics.
ISSN:2367-0134
2367-0142
DOI:10.1007/s41542-022-00131-x