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Effective Research Programs

Dollard, M. F., & Winefield, A. H. (2002). 'Mental health: Overemployment, underemployment, unemployment and healthy jobs.' In L. Morrow, I. Verins, & E. Willis (Eds.), Mental health and work: Issues and perspectives. Adelaide: Auseinet: The Australian Network for Promotion, Prevention and Early Intervention for Mental Health.

Dollard and Winefield (2002) advise that the National Occupational Health and Safety Symposium on the Occupational Health and Safety Implications of Stress, in Melbourne 2001 (Dollard, 2001) advanced a number of key policy implications from the evidence base, a philosophical framework, and processes to deal with new stressors as they emerge.

From that symposium, the authors advance the following ideas for research programs (recently outlined by Levi, 2002, p.x).

  • Systems-oriented, addressing health-related interactions in the person-environment ecosystem (eg family, school, work, hospital, and older people's homes).
  • Interdisciplinary, covering and integrating medical, physiological, emotional, behavioural, social, and economic aspects.
  • Oriented to problem solving, including epidemiological identification of health problems and their environmental and lifestyle correlates, followed by longitudinal interdisciplinary field studies of exposures, reactions, and health outcomes, and then by subsequent experimental evaluation under real-life conditions of presumably health-promoting and disease-preventing interventions.
  • Health-oriented (not merely disease oriented), trying to identify what constitutes and promotes good health and counteracts ill health.
  • Intersectoral, promoting and evaluating environmental and health actions administered in other sectors (eg employment, housing, nutrition, traffic, and education).
  • Participatory, interacting closely with potential caregivers, receivers, planners, and policy makers.
  • International, facilitating transcultural, collaborative, and complementary projects with centres in other countries.
  • Evaluation of interventions.

Further reading can be found at:
Mental Health and Work
National Policies for Mental Health
Promoting Wellbeing at Work