About the study

Introduction

For many years, Sweden has been a leading nation in work environment research. The country has a strong tradition of surveying conditions in the workplace, in particular through the biennial Swedish Work Environment Survey (SWES), a repeated cross-sectional study that began in 1989. While SWES provides a good picture of the changing conditions in working life, new questions continually arise. Further, it is not possible to see what comes first: Does a poor working environment affect health, or is it the case the people already in poor health tend to get poorer quality jobs? Answering these questions is facilitated by following the same people over time, in repeated-measures studies that observe whether improvements and deteriorations in the work environment predict changes in health. SLOSH offers these possibilities to researchers.

Other aspects highlighted in SLOSH are conditions outside of the workplace, for example how retirement affects health. By asking participants questions that have not previously been asked in a nationally representative sample in Sweden, SLOSH offers the opportunity to shed light on the existence of little-studied and new conditions in the workplace, including technostress, organizational change and telework. In this way, the SLOSH panel generates unique opportunities to research the health consequences of work.

All SLOSH participants are followed up, regardless of their labour market status, creating a sample that can be used to study participants who leave their jobs, for example through unemployment or retirement. In the future, we will add participants still in their teens in order to investigate health in relation to education, entering the labour market and any consequences of not working or studying.

Advantages and limitations

One of the major advantages of SLOSH is that it is based on a large, nationally representative sample of the working population. The large sample makes it possible to draw conclusions that apply to the general working population, but also to study particular groups, e.g., people who work in human services professions. However, the greatest advantage of the SLOSH study lies in its longitudinal design. Following the same people with similar questions over time provides the opportunity to analyze not only correlations, but also causality. Something that cannot be done in a cross-sectional study like SWES.

The longitudinal design has another very important advantage – it becomes possible to study the health consequences of changes as well. In today's mobile working life, where few people can expect to have the same job for the rest of their lives, these changes can have at least as large consequences as the working environment in an individual workplace. Considering the aging population, questions about retirement and possibilities for an extended working life become particularly interesting.

The opportunities to study changes also have a technical side. If you can show that a change in a certain measure has a prospective relationship with how health changes, then that is an even stronger sign of a causal relationship than if you just show that different levels at one time are related to health at a later time.

SLOSH builds on a tradition of high-quality cohort studies – notably Whitehall II, GAZEL and the Ten Town/Finnish Public Sector Study – but is unique in that it is based on a nationally representative sample followed over a long time period. SLOSH is a valuable infrastructure for a large number of ongoing and planned studies. Its value for research will increase even more over time through new data collections, refreshment with new participants and an ever-lengthning follow-up time.