Identifying environmental factors that have significant impacts on sweatshop workers' stress and anxiety status: A photo-narrative study

Abstract

Stress and anxiety are pervasive and serious mental health problems in the workplace, especially in manufacturing factories. They can lead to severe disease and social problems. Most previous studies ascribe workers’ mental health problems to social-demographic and employment factors. Few have explored whether, and to what extent, the outdoor environment impacts workers’ stress and anxiety. This is a significant knowledge gap because we will lose the opportunity to promote thousands of millions of manufacturing works’ mental health through outdoor environmental interventions in the developing and underdeveloped countries. This participatory photograph survey study focused on one of the biggest manufacturing factories in the electronics industry, where many suicides have occurred. We recruited 106 workers for the study. Each worker shot three photos for three different settings which had remarkable impacts on her/his mental health in the past. Then the worker was interviewed and made a narrative about their feeling and memory of each photograph setting. Through text analysis, we identified key environmental factors that have the significant association with workers’ stress and anxiety status. Last, we suggest prioritized environmental interventions to promote workers’ mental health in manufacturing factories.