Psychosocial working characteristics before retirement and depressive symptoms across the retirement transition: a longitudinal latent class analysis

Objectives: Retirement is a major life transition. However, previous evidence on its mental health effects has been inconclusive. Whether retirement is desirable or not may depend on pre-retirement work characteristics. We investigated trajectories of depressive symptoms across retirement and how a number of psychosocial working characteristics influenced these trajectories. Methods: We included 1735 respondents from the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH), retiring during 2008–2016 (mean retirement age 66 years). They had completed biennial questionnaires reporting job demands, decision authority, workplace social support, efforts, rewards, procedural justice and depressive symptoms. We applied group-based trajectory modelling to model trajectories of depressive symptoms across retirement. Multinomial logistic regression analyses estimated the associations between psychosocial working characteristics and depressive symptom trajectories. Results: We identified five depression trajectories. In four of them, depressive symptoms decreased slightly around retirement. In one, the symptom level was initially high, then decreased markedly across retirement. Perceptions of job demands, job strain, workplace social support, rewards, effort–reward imbalance and procedural justice were associated with the trajectories, while perceptions of decision authority and work efforts were only partly related to the trajectories. Conclusions: We observed a rather positive development of depressive symptoms across retirement in a sample of Swedish retirees. For a small group with poor psychosocial working characteristics, symptoms clearly decreased, which may indicate that a relief from poor working characteristics is associated with an improvement for some retirees. However, for other retirees poor working characteristics were associated with persistent symptoms, suggesting a long-term effect of these work stressors.


Job demands, decision authority and social support
Four items (working fast, too much effort, enough time and conflicting demands) were used to calculate the job demand score (mean α = 0.69) and two items (deciding what to do at work, deciding how to do your work) were used for the subdimension decision authority of job control (mean α = 0.75), ranging from "Never/almost never" 1) to "Often" 4) (1). Five items (calm and pleasant atmosphere, good spirit of unity, colleagues are there for me, people understand a bad day, get on well with my supervisors) were used for the workplace social support score (mean α = 0.84), ranging from "Strongly disagree" 1) to "Strongly agree" 4).
The median values across waves for job demands, decision authority and social support were 2.5, 3.0-3.5 and 3.0-3.1 respectively.

Efforts, rewards and effort-reward imbalance
Three items were used for the work efforts score (time pressure due to work load, job become more demanding and workload increased) (mean α = 0.78), while rewards were assessed using seven items (lack acknowledgement supervisor, poor promotion prospects, experience(d) undesirable change, job security poor, not receive respect/prestige, work prospects adequate, salary/income adequate) (mean α = 0.71), ranging from "Strongly disagree" 1) to "Strongly agree" 4). We also calculated the effort-reward imbalance (ERI) ratio by dividing efforts by rewards (with rewards multiplied by a correction factor of 3/7≈0.43 to adjust for unequal number of items of the two scales). A ratio of >1 indicated a high level of effort that is not met by the rewards received or expected, while a ratio <1 indicated a favourable condition of relatively low efforts in relation to rewards (2). The median values across waves for effort, reward and effort reward imbalance were 8-11, 18-21 and 1.0-1.2 respectively.

Procedural justice
Seven items were used to assess procedural justice (decisions taken correctly, bad decisions revoked/changed, all sides affected represented, decisions taken consistently, everyone give their opinion, feedback provided and people informed, possible obtain details underlying decision) (mean α = 0.91), with response options ranging from "Strongly agree" 1) to "Strongly disagree" 5). The median values across waves for procedural justice were 3.3-3.7.

Covariates
Demographic characteristics included sex (men/women), age at retirement, civil status Health characteristics included three measures of health risk behaviours, as well as two common chronic diseases, namely cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Physical inactivity was measured by the question How much exercise do you get? Include any walking or cycling you do to work. and those who responded that they never exercise or who responded that they do not exercise very much were defined as physically inactive. Excessive alcohol consumption was measured by the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) in wave one and two (4

Depressive symptoms
The six items measured to assess depressive symptoms (feeling blue, feeling no interest in things, feeling lethargic or low in energy, worrying too much about things, blaming oneself for things and feeling everything is an effort) (mean α = 0.91) represent core symptoms, selected based on principles of clinical validity (6). The SCL-CD6 scale has been validated and found to have good psychometric properties, including adequate construct validity, high unidimensionality and predictive of hospitalization and antidepressant medication (7).