A multivariate approach to feeling of fatigue in relation to individual workers' working and living conditions

In an attempt to understand fatigue of industrial workers in an integrated framework of their daily life behavior, the occurrence of fatigue feeling during a one-month period was related to working and living conditions of individual workers. The data were collected using a questionnaire from every day for one month from 32 workers engaged in four different types of jobs in a chemical factory in Tokyo. Six kinds of daily behavior reported on via the questionnaire were taken as explanatory variables for occurrence of fatigue feeling, together with age, job type, and number of days from the last off-day. The statistical analyses including multi-discriminant analysis by Hayashi's Quantification II method disclosed that the workers' fatigue feeling was influenced by various factors, and that such behavioral variables as liquor intake and physical exercise on the previous day played decisive roles to the extent similar to age or job type variables.