2018 Volume 26 Issue 3 Pages 283-290
Objective: Reducing long working hours is a primary goal of the government's "Work-style reform." This paper reviewed major studies exploring the relationship between working long hours, quick return to workplace, and worker's mental health to clarify findings with respect to this relationship and several methodological problems.
Contents: Many articles have been produced on the relationship between working hours and worker's mental health in the fields of epidemiology and social sciences. However, most of them use cross-sectional data and mainly examined health care workers. Therefore, their results can include various biases. Furthermore, most studies examined how the intervals between shifts are associated with worker's mental health, but they have focused on only night-shift workers. Therefore, the relationship still remains unclear between quick return to work and mental health of daily workers.
Conclusions: Investigations are required to exclude the possibility of omitted variables' bias and reverse causality using quasi-experimental approach. Such interventions will precisely examine the relationship between working hours and worker's mental health, which has been suggested in the previous literature.