Psychological Resilience and Occupational Injuries
- 1 University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
- 2 Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki, Finland
- 3 Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
Resilience embodies the personal qualities that enable one to thrive in the face of adversity. A previous Italian study showed that injured workers had a lower level of resilience than non-injured workers. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between occupational injuries and psychological resilience. The subjects consisted of 197 drivers from two Finnish waste transport companies. As part of a larger questionnaire, they filled in the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, which had 25 items. The drivers reported their occupational injuries during the last three years. The drivers with occupational injuries had a higher score (average 69.3) on the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale than the drivers without injuries (67.7). According to Student’s t-test, the difference between the groups was highly significant (t = 40.44, df = 196, p < 0.001). The result of this study was contradictory to the earlier Italian study. One explanation may be that the Italian study had been done in a traumatic context with seriously injured patients. The waste transport drivers were rather young and fit males, who had suffered only minor injuries.
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