[Relationship between perceived health status and career choice in a sample of wage-earners]

Many factors were related with subjective health status (SHS), but few studies have focused on identifying some intrinsic personal factors like the choice of job and perceived working situations. The present paper examines the relationships among such factors in a large French sample. Data were collected from 21,378 subjects who were randomly selected from the lists of male and female wage earners who were followed up by 380 occupational physicians and who were born in 1938, 1943, 1948 or 1953. SHS was evaluated using the French version of the Nottingham Health Profile (NHP). Socio-demographic and job characteristics were assessed by means of closed questions during the annual medical examination. Results showed that low subjective health status was related to sex, age and perceived working situation: for each of the six areas of the NHP (pain, physical mobility, energy, sleep, social isolation, emotional reactions) there was a lower SHS for women and a decrease with age for both sexes. The poorer the perceived working situations the worse was the SHS. Using general linear models it appeared that independently of these factors and the socio-economical category dichotomized in upper classes versus lower classes, those who had claimed to have not chosen their job had a lower SHS, whatever the area of SHS. Awaiting the second survey in 1995, it is difficult to explain these results from this cross sectional analysis: is the choice of job a possible risk factor or an artefact due to some unmeasured confounding factors like motivation or job satisfaction.