Working environment and health

Summary

Strengths: The plan for making this survey a regular, bi-annual data collection until 2020 will be useful in evaluating changes in the working environment and health situation of the Danish labour force. AH12 allows for a comparison of experienced working environment for different age groups and job titles for a wide range of physical and mental health measures. Weakness: The following data collections are also cross-section, so the respondents from AH12 will not be followed by the future questionnaires, but one can still follow their progress e.g. in the labour market or their use of the health system by looking at registry data. This would also allow for tracing individuals' work histories.

Type of data

Data Source
Survey

Type of Study
Crosssection regular

Data gathering method
Self administered questionnaire
Other: Self-administered questionnaire that uses several approaches. First approach: a letter with a link to an online questionnaire. Second approach: a letter with a link and a printed version of the questionnaire. Third approach: Telephone contact offering to send a new questionnaire.

Access to data

Conditions of access

Type of available data (e.g. anonymised microdata, aggregated tables, etc.)
N.A.

Formats available
Frequency tables and diagrams for each of the questions (incl. number of respondents) can be viewed online; split by age/gender, sector and job title. The tables can be exported to Excel.

Coverage

Coverage Years of collection, reference years, and sample sizes
Data was first collected in 2012. Data collection will be repeated biannually until 2020. The sample size of the first wave was 16,300 respondents out of a total of 35,000 contacted.

First year of collection
2012

Stratification if applicable
Random sample of 35,000 individuals aged 18-64 that are active in the labour market. An additional 15,000 individuals working at 1,000 specific workplaces have also been contacted. The publicly available data concerns the first sample.

Base used for sampling

Geographical coverage and breakdowns
Entire country

Age range
18-64. Number of men/women (who answered the question about weekly working hours): 2,261/2,812 aged 45-54 and 1,855/1,931 aged 55-64.

Statistical representativeness
Other, please specify

Coverage of main and cross-cutting topics
There are 51 main questions about working environment and health. Examples of topics in the survey include working hours, health promotion initiatives, safety, physical demands of the job, noise and vibrations, exposure to chemicals, threats, bullying, quality of leadership, influence, support from colleagues and supervisor, engagement and meaningfulness, work-life balance, job uncertainty, self-evaluated mental and physical health.

Linkage

Standardisation
Job titles follow the Danish version of the ISCO-08 standard. The 12 questions that make up the Major Depression Inventory (MDI) are used to calculate a MDI score.

Possibility of linkage among databases
Yes, registry information on job title and sector have been merged in the sample. Additional variables from the registries could be added.

Data quality

Entry errors if applicable
Some individuals do not have a job title (ISCO-08 code) in the official registers at all. For others, their job title falls under the "rest category", which is difficult to group according to working environment.

Breaks
A similar data collection was conducted in 2010, but is only partly comparable. The AH12 data collection is forward-looking in the sense that it has been constructed with a view to being repeated biannually until 2020.

Consistency of terminology or coding used during collection
The same questions will be repeated every other year.

Governance

Contact information
Elsa Bach
Det Nationale Forskningscenter for Arbejdsmiljø
Lersø Parkallé 105
2100 København Ø Denmark Phone: (+45) 3916 5278
Email: eba(at)arbejdsmiljoforskning.dk
Url: http://www.arbejdsmiljoforskning.dk/da/arbejdsmiljoedata/arbejdsmiljoe-og-helbred-20/arbejdsmiljo-og-helbred-2012

Timeliness, transparency
Data collection in April 2012. Basic tables (split by job type, age and gender) available to the public on the website in December 2012.